Case Law, The Most Important Sources Of Law

When it comes to discuss English law, the fundamental point is known as case law, which means they do not have particular documents which describe and keep the law. Therefore, it is also called unwritten law, which is quite rare among western democratic countries. As mentioned, they do not have particular written document, though, there are still authority. There are eight sources of law, Case law, Acts of Parliament, Statutory Interpretation, Delegated Legislation, European law, Custom, Equity and Treaties . In this essay, if judicial precedent is the most important source of law will be analysed with suggesting three sources, judicial precedent, acts of parliament and delegated legislation.

Judicial precedent is also called Case law or Judicial

When it comes to follow the actual case, the defence of duress might be accepted, however, obiter dicta deny it. Like this case shows, obiter dicta are not compulsory to be followed, though still it is fundamental in terms of deciding the judgement. The great reason of having the judicial decision is to be fair to every cases. Reflecting or applying the previous cases to the similar cases, it will enable to prevent the judges from having different and unfair judgement. Judicial decision works with several points. Like it mentioned already, if the case is similar to previous precedence, it will apply to it in the same way. However, before that process, the judge will distinguish if the law should be applied on that or not. In addition, if necessary, as a privilege of higher courts, they can overrule what lower courts have decided already. It should make sure not to disrupt the respect toward lower courts. In addition, if the lower court interprets the law wrongly, the decision will be reversed by the higher courts. All these rules can be summarised as the doctrine of precedent or the doctrine of stare decisis. There

To sum up for each sources, regarding to Judicial precedent, to make decision in the court, the judge’s decision is bound by the previous decision in higher court. This is based on the doctrine of stare decisis. The binding part is called racio decidendi. The rest of non-binding part is obiter dicta. Regarding to Statute law, this is also called Acts of Parliament, and this is the primary legislation within the English law. Statutes are formed by the Parliament with very long process. While the procedure of creating the Acts of Parliament are very huge and it is not flexible, the advantage is to be able to influence the public opinion by MPs. As the last part of the source of law, Delegated legislation, this is also called Secondary legislation. It is formed of statutory instruments, bye-laws and orders in council. The number of Delegated legislation is more than Acts of Parliament, because for creating secondary legislation is far more flexible than doing for Statute law. moreover, the reason why delegated legislation is necessary is that for making some particular law, the opinions or knowledges of experts or local community is needed. However, by means of parliament sovereignty delegated legislation does approve only under enabling Act and Parliament is always controlling the power. Even if by comparing each fundamental parts, it is difficult to say which