Law European Commission

In addition a Lawyer may become a legal researcher who provides on-demand legal research through a library, a commercial service or freelance work. Many people trained in law put their skills to use outside the legal field entirely. The executive in a legal system serves as the centre of political authority of the State. In a parliamentary system, as with Britain, Italy, Germany, India, and Japan, the executive is known as the cabinet, and composed of members of the legislature.

• That’s what makes UW a different kind of law school, and why Wisconsin will make you a different — and better — kind of lawyer.
• Another example of a trustee’s duty might be to invest property wisely or sell it.
• The small Greek city-state, ancient Athens, from about the 8th century BC was the first society to be based on broad inclusion of its citizenry, excluding women and enslaved people.
• Immigration law and nationality law concern the rights of foreigners to live and work in a nation-state that is not their own and to acquire or lose citizenship.
• This is mainly contained in a body of law and jurisprudence known as Sharia and Fiqh respectively.

In common law legal systems, decisions by courts are explicitly acknowledged as “law” on equal footing with statutes adopted through the legislative process and with regulations issued by the executive branch. The “doctrine of precedent”, or stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by decisions”) means that decisions by higher courts bind lower courts, and future decisions of the same court, to assure that similar cases reach similar results. Many Muslim countries have developed similar rules about legal education and the legal profession, but some still allow lawyers with training in traditional Islamic law to practice law before personal status law courts. In China and other developing countries there are not sufficient professionally trained people to staff the existing judicial systems, and, accordingly, formal standards are more relaxed.

Jurisprudence, the field of knowledge which encompasses these rules.She went to university to study law. Unlike criminal matters and the policing of trades and markets, religious courts had no executive powers in matters of family law. Law and order is the condition of a society in which laws are obeyed, and social life and business go on in an organized way. As a law student, you will be expected to read many articles, journals, magazines, or textbooks. Civil law jurisdictions recognise custom as “the other source of law”; hence, scholars tend to divide the civil law into the broad categories of “written law” or legislation, and “unwritten law” (ius non-scriptum) or custom. Yet they tend to dismiss custom as being of slight importance compared to legislation (Georgiadis, General Principles of Civil Law, 19; Washofsky, Taking Precedent Seriously, 7).

Normally there will be several readings and amendments proposed by the different political factions. If a country has an entrenched constitution, a special majority for changes to the constitution may be required, making changes to the law more difficult. A government usually leads the process, which can be formed from Members of Parliament (e.g. the UK or Germany). However, in a presidential system, the government is usually formed by an executive and his or her appointed cabinet officials (e.g. the United States or Brazil).

Word History

John Locke, in his Two Treatises of Government, and Baron de Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws, advocated for a separation of powers between the political, legislature and executive bodies. Their principle was that no person should be able to usurp all powers of the state, in contrast to the absolutist theory of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Sun Yat-sen’s Five Power Constitution for the Republic of China took the separation of powers further by having two additional branches of government—a Control Yuan for auditing oversight and an Examination Yuan to manage the employment of public officials. Civil law jurisdictions treat contracts differently in a number of respects, with a more interventionist role for the state in both the formation and enforcement of contracts. In France, an ordinary contract is said to form simply on the basis of a “meeting of the minds” or a “concurrence of wills”.

Environmental protection also serves to penalise polluters within domestic legal systems. Writing in the early 20th century, Max Weber believed that a definitive feature of a developed state had come to be its bureaucratic support. The head of state is apart from the executive, and symbolically enacts laws and acts as representative of the nation. Examples include the President of Germany , the Queen of the United Kingdom , and the President of Austria . The other important model is the presidential system, found in the United States and in Brazil.

Land law forms the basis for most kinds of property law, and is the most complex. It concerns mortgages, rental agreements, licences, covenants, easements and the statutory systems for land registration. Regulations on the use of personal property fall under intellectual property, company law, trusts and commercial law.