Statutory Legislation

Principal Powers of Court in Statutory Legislation

Principal Powers of Court in Statutory Legislation

What is Statutory Legislation?

A set of rules that proscribe or permit interrelationships among people and organizations, provide procedures for ensuring the fair treatment of people, and prescribe punishments for those who do not follow these established rules. A law is also the document that sets the rules governing the conduct. Law determines by the state and can be classified in a number of ways. It can be classified according to its origin: common or statutory. Common law derives from previous judicial decisions. Statutory laws are written rules established by an act of the legislature, which are either having a signature by the executive or passed over the executive's veto by the legislature. Law can also be classified according to class: civil (or private) or criminal (or public). Civil law is a body of rules that delineate private rights and remedies and governs disputes between individuals or organizations in areas such as contract, property, and family conflicts. Criminal laws define crimes and establish punishments by the state. Criminal law may be common or statutory (Clayton, 1999, pp. 15).

Law can also be divided into natural or positive law. Natural law is normative and is the base on a common understanding of what is right and proper. It typically originates from moral and religious precepts as well as a common understanding of fairness and justice. Positive law determined by the institutional facts internal to a legal system. The facts may or may not meet moral standards. Positive law must be obeyed however; much it falls short of moral ideals. What is law is a factual question and should be kept distinct from what the law ought to be (Portman, 2010, pp. 354).

Powers available for Courts

The field of judicial politics began when scholars began to doubt that the decisions of judges driven solely, or primarily, by the law. The legal argument has traditionally maintained that judges are like technicians, applying the law to the facts, so that the decisions they make are not on the basis on their preferences or their emotions but an expert reading of the law. Judicial politics insists that this account is both incomplete and misleading. The primary goal in the field is to explain what factors influence the decisions made by judges, particularly those serving on the U.K. Supreme Court and other appellate tribunals. There are other topics raised in the field of judicial politics, including the interaction between courts and other parts of the political system and the ability of judges to effect change outside their courtrooms (Moustafa, 2008, pp. 12).

The study of courts in comparative perspective requires that one first determine exactly what constitutes a court. Ear1y work in the comparative study of judicial systems attempted to provide this definition. An influential study is Theodore Becker's Comparative Judicial Politics: The Political Functioning of Courts (1970). In this study, Becker defined a court as follows:

(1) a man or body of men (2) with power to decide ...