美国 法律 数目

Sources of law

In the United States, the law is derived from four sources. These four sources are constitutional law, statutory law, administrative regulations and the common law (which includes case law). The most important source of law is the United States Constitution. All other law falls under, and is subordinate to, that document. No law may contradict the Constitution. For example, if Congress enacts a statute that conflicts with the Constitution, the Supreme Court may find that law unconstitutional, and declare it invalid.

Notably, a statute does not disappear automatically merely because it has been found unconstitutional; it must be deleted by a subsequent statute. Many federal and state statutes have remained on the books for decades after they were ruled to be unconstitutional. However, under the principle of stare decisis, no sensible lower court will enforce an unconstitutional statute, and any court that does so will be reversed by the Supreme Court. Conversely, any court that refuses to enforce a constitutional statute (where such constitutionality has been expressly established in prior cases) will risk reversal by the Supreme Court.[2]

Also, certain practices traditionally allowed under English common law were outlawed by the Constitution, such as bills of attainder[3] and general search warrants.[4]

[edit] American common law

The United States and most Commonwealth countries are heirs to the common law legal tradition of English law;[5] for example, U.S. courts have inherited the principle of stare decisis.

English law was formally "received" into the United States in several ways. First, all U.S. states except Louisiana have enacted "reception" statutes which generally state that the common law of England (particularly judge-made law) is the law of the state to the extent that it is not repugnant to domestic law or indigenous conditions.[6] Some reception statutes impose a specific cutoff date for reception, such as the date of a colony's founding, while others are deliberately vague.[7] Thus, contemporary U.S. courts often cite pre-Revolution cases when discussing the evolution of an ancient judge-made common law principle into its modern form[8], such as the heightened duty of care traditionally imposed upon common carriers.[9]

Second, a small number of important British statutes in effect at the time of the Revolution have been independently reenacted by U.S. states. Two examples that many lawyers will recognize are the Statute of Frauds (still widely known in the U.S. by that name) and the Statute of 13 Elizabeth (the ancestor of the Uniform Fraudulent Transfers Act). Such English statutes are still regularly cited in contemporary American cases interpreting their modern American descendants.[10]

However, it is important to understand that despite the presence of reception statutes, much of contemporary American common law has diverged significantly from British Commonwealth common law. The reason is that although the courts of the various Commonwealth nations are often influenced by each other's rulings, American courts rarely follow post-Revolution Commonwealth rulings unless there is no American ruling on point, the facts and law at issue are nearly identical, and the reasoning is strongly persuasive.

Early on, American courts, even after the Revolution, often did cite contemporary English cases. This was because appellate decisions from many American courts were not regularly reported until the mid-19th century; lawyers and judges, as creatures of habit, used English legal materials to fill the gap.[11] But citations to English decisions gradually disappeared during the 19th century as American courts developed their own principles to resolve the legal problems of the American people.[12] The number of published volumes of American reports soared from eighteen in 1810 to over 8,000 by 1910.[13] Today, in the words of Stanford law professor Lawrence Friedman: "American cases rarely cite foreign materials. Courts occasionally cite a British classic or two, a famous old case, or a nod to Blackstone; but current British law almost never gets any mention."[14]

Some adherents of originalism and strict constructionism such as Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court argue that American courts should never look for guidance to post-Revolution cases from legal systems outside of the United States, regardless of whether the reasoning is persuasive,[15] with the sole exception of cases interpreting international treaties to which the United States is a signatory. This position follows inevitably from the philosophy of originalism, which posits not only that the Constitution is the ultimate source of judicial authority in the U.S., but that the only proper analysis of the document consists of discerning the document's original meaning at the time of its adoption. Therefore, discussion of British law that postdates the Constitution is irrelevant as it sheds no light on the original meaning of the Constitution. Others, such as Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer, disagree, and cite foreign law from time to time, where they believe it is informative, persuasive, useful or helpful. However, foreign law has never been cited as binding precedent, but merely as a reflection of the shared values of Anglo-American civilization or even Western civilization in general.[16]

[edit] Federal law

Federal law originates with the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to enact statutes for certain limited purposes like regulating interstate commerce. Nearly all statutes have been codified in the United States Code. Many statutes give executive branch agencies the power to create regulations, which are published in the Federal Register and codified into the Code of Federal Regulations. Regulations generally also carry the force of law under the Chevron doctrine. Many lawsuits turn on the meaning of a federal statute or regulation, and judicial interpretations of such meaning carry legal force under the principle of stare decisis.

In the beginning, federal law traditionally focused on areas where there was a express grant of power to the federal government in the federal Constitution, like the military, money, foreign affairs (especially international treaties), tariffs, intellectual property (specifically patents and copyrights), and mail. Since the start of the 20th century, aggressive interpretations of the Commerce and Spending Clauses of the Constitution have enabled federal law to expand into areas like aviation, telecommunications, railroads, pharmaceuticals, antitrust, and trademarks. In some areas, like aviation and railroads, the federal government has developed a comprehensive scheme that preempts virtually all state law, while in others, like family law, a relatively small number of federal statutes (generally covering interstate and international situations) interacts with a much larger body of state law. In areas like antitrust and trademark, there are powerful laws at both the federal and state levels that coexist with each other.

[edit] State law

Volumes of the Thomson West annotated version of the California Penal Code, the codification of criminal law in the state of CaliforniaThe fifty American states are separate sovereigns with their own state constitutions and state governments.[17] They retain plenary power to make laws covering anything not preempted by the federal Constitution, federal statutes, or international treaties ratified by the federal Senate.

The law of most of the states is based on the common law of England; the notable exception is Louisiana, whose law is based upon the Napoleonic Code. The passage of time has led to state courts and legislatures expanding, overruling, or modifying the common law; as a result, the laws of any given state invariably differ from the laws of its sister states.

Many American states have codified some or all of their statutory law into legal codes. Codification was an idea borrowed from the civil law through the efforts of American lawyer David Dudley Field. New York's codes are known as "Laws." California and Texas simply call them "Codes." Other states use terms such as "Revised Statutes" or "Compiled Statutes" for their compilations. California, New York, and Texas have separate subject-specific codes, while all other states and the federal government use a single code divided into numbered titles.

In some states, codification is often treated as a mere restatement of the common law. Judges are free to liberally interpret the codes unless and until their interpretations are specifically overridden by the legislature.[18] In other states, there is a tradition of strict adherence to the plain text of the codes.

The advantage of codification is that once the state legislature becomes accustomed to writing new laws as amendments to an existing code, the code will usually reflect democratic sentiment as to what the current law is (though the entire state of the law must always be ascertained by reviewing case law to determine how judges have interpreted a particular codified statute).

In contrast, in jurisdictions with uncodified statutes, like the United Kingdom, determining what the law is can be a more difficult process. One has to trace back to the earliest relevant Act of Parliament, and then identify all later Acts which amended the earlier Act, or which directly overrode it. For example, when the UK decided to create a Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, lawmakers had to identify every single Act referring to the House of Lords that was still good law, and then amend all of those laws to refer to the Supreme Court.[19]

法律多是多，但不是没有用，你只要知道遇到什么问题找拿方面的法律专家就行了。

又比如说现代科学的分支众多，有几个人能掌握其万分之一？但这不能说科技没用。