Law 3101A/B Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Napoleonic Code, Ratio Decidendi, Roman Law
Document Summary
Characteristics of law: create legal rules def. of terms, create competencies etc enforced by collective means attached to a specified sanction. Two legal families: common law/civil law, with further subdivisions within civil law (french family, Positive law: explicitly created/stated and valid by means of judicial decisions, bound to be used. Certainty about the content of the law: certainty that the law will be enforced, certainty that the law will be applied consistently. Reasoning by way of analogy to previous cases stare decisis. Precedent: judicial decisions are either 1. evidence that the law already existed: create a new rule that didn"t exist. The rule will have to be applied in cases onwards either way. Equity: set of rules and principles developed to mitigate the results that might have been considered unfair when applied according to the common law a corrector of the common law => focused on obtaining fair results.
