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Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a science and as the art of justice. State-enforced laws can be made by a legislature, resulting in statutes; by the executive through decrees and regulations; or by judges' decisions, which form precedent in common law jurisdictions. An autocrat may exercise those functions within their realm. The creation of laws themselves may be influenced by a constitution, written or tacit, and the rights encoded therein. The law shapes politics, economics, history and society in various ways and also serves as a mediator of relations between people.

Legal systems vary between jurisdictions, with their differences analysed in comparative law. In civil law jurisdictions, a legislature or other central body codifies and consolidates the law. In common law systems, judges may make binding case law through precedent, although on occasion this may be overturned by a higher court or the legislature. Religious law is in use in some religious communities and states, and has historically influenced secular law.

The scope of law can be divided into two domains: public law concerns government and society, including constitutional law, administrative law, and criminal law; while private law deals with legal disputes between parties in areas such as contracts, property, torts, delicts and commercial law. This distinction is stronger in civil law countries, particularly those with a separate system of administrative courts; by contrast, the public-private law divide is less pronounced in common law jurisdictions. (Full article...)

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Tracing is a procedure in English law used to identify property (such as money) which has been taken from the claimant involuntarily or which the claimant wishes to recover. It is not in itself a way to recover the property, but rather to identify it so that the courts can decide what remedy to apply. The procedure is used in several situations, broadly demarcated by whether the property has been transferred because of theft, breach of trust, or mistake.

Tracing is divided into two forms, common law tracing and equitable tracing. Common law tracing relies on the claimant having legal ownership of the property, and will fail if the property has been mixed with other property, the legal title has been transferred to the defendant, or the legal title has been transferred by the defendant to any further recipient of the property. Equitable tracing, on the other hand, relies on the claimant having an equitable interest in the property, and can succeed where the property has been mixed with other property.

Defences to tracing are possible, particularly if returning the property would harm an innocent defendant, where the claimant has made false representations that the defendant relied on to his detriment, or where the property has been transferred to an innocent third party without anything given to the defendant in return that the claimant could recover in lieu. (Full article...)

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Selected biography

Antonin Gregory Scalia (March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the history of the Supreme Court. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.

Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey. A devout Catholic, he attended the Jesuit Xavier High School before receiving his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. Scalia went on to graduate from Harvard Law School and spent six years at Jones Day before becoming a law professor at the University of Virginia. In the early 1970s, he served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, eventually becoming an assistant attorney general under President Gerald Ford. He spent most of the Carter years teaching at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the first faculty advisers of the fledgling Federalist Society. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed Scalia as a judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Four years later, Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court, where Scalia became its first Italian-American justice following a unanimous confirmation by the U.S. Senate 98–0.

Scalia espoused a conservative jurisprudence and ideology, advocating textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation. He peppered his colleagues with "Ninograms" (memos named for his nickname, "Nino") intending to persuade them to his point of view. He was a strong defender of the powers of the executive branch and believed that the U.S. Constitution permitted the death penalty and did not guarantee the right to either abortion or same-sex marriage. Furthermore, Scalia viewed affirmative action and other policies that afforded special protected status to minority groups as unconstitutional. Such positions would earn him a reputation as one of the most conservative justices on the Court. He filed separate opinions in many cases, often castigating the Court's majority—sometimes scathingly so. (Full article...)

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A statute is a formal written enactment of a legislative body, a stage in the process of legislation. Typically, statutes command or prohibit something, or declare policy. Statutes are laws made by legislative bodies; they are distinguished from case law or precedent, which is decided by courts, regulations issued by government agencies, and oral or customary law.^{[better source needed]} Statutes may originate with the legislative body of a country, state or province, county, or municipality. (Full article...)

The Limitation Act 1963 (c. 47) was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that amended the statute of limitations to allow actions in some cases where the injured party had not discovered the injury until after the standard date of expiration. The Act was based on the report of the Davies Committee on Limitation of Actions in Cases of Personal Injury, created after the Court of Appeal decision in the case of Cartledge v Jopling, and the Committee notably produced their final report before Cartledge had been heard in the House of Lords. The draft bill was presented to Parliament on 6 May 1963; it was given the Royal Assent on 31 July and came into force on the same day.

The act allowed an injured party to bring a claim outside the normal statute of limitations period if he could show that he was not aware of the injuries himself until after the limitation period had expired and if he gained the permission of the court. After a series of problems emerged, including vagueness on a point even the House of Lords was unable to clarify and poor draftsmanship, the Act was repealed bit by bit during the 1970s, with the Limitation Act 1980 scrapping the last remaining sections. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

... that Dutch physician Aletta Jacobs′ legal challenge to be added to the Amsterdam electoral rolls backfired, leading to a constitutional amendment granting voting rights only to men?

... that in English law, legal relations created in a social context are not considered binding?

... that in 2011, Argentinian lawyer Elsa Kelly (pictured) was appointed the first women judge on the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea?

... that the English Statute of Enrolments, believed to have been emergency legislation, contains no preamble and was drafted by the Clerk of the House of Commons rather than a legislator?

... that when Henry McCardie was a barrister, he often worked so late that his chambers were nicknamed "the lighthouse", as there was light coming from the windows?

... that the diaries of James Humphreys, the "Emperor of Porn", were used to convict 13 policemen of accepting his bribes?

... that a kidney transplantation scandal led to a 2011 amendment to the law on organ donation in India?

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Selected images

Image 1A courtroom in Tokyo, Japan
Image 2The first Supreme Court of Puerto Rico
Image 3Jawaharlal Nehru at the Allahabad High Court
Image 4Signing of the Magna Carta
Image 5Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States as of October 2020
Image 6Jeremy Bentham's writings influenced law for generations.
Image 7The defendants sitting in the dock during the Nuremberg Trials
Image 8Chief Justice John Marshall (1755 – 1835), an American statesman and jurist who greatly influenced constitutional law'
Image 9Painting of a jury deliberating
Image 10Statue of Lady Justice holding scales
Image 11King Hammurabi receiving the code of laws from the Mesopotamian sun god Shamash
Image 12Legal systems of the world
Image 13Emperor Justinian I (527–565) of the Byzantine Empire who ordered the codification of Corpus Juris Civilis.
Image 14The Langdell Library of Harvard Law School
Image 15The Constitution of India

Selected case

Case law, also used interchangeably with common law, is a law that is based on precedents, that is the judicial decisions from previous cases, rather than law based on constitutions, statutes, or regulations. Case law uses the detailed facts of a legal case that have been resolved by courts or similar tribunals. These past decisions are called "case law", or precedent. Stare decisis—a Latin phrase meaning "let the decision stand"—is the principle by which judges are bound to such past decisions, drawing on established judicial authority to formulate their positions. (Full article...)

The slightly battered black and white photograph depicts Wong Kim Ark facing directly towards the camera. He has a round face, short receding hair and is wearing a jacket with a standing collar and rounded edges

United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), is a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which held that "a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicile and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China", automatically became a U.S. citizen at birth. Wong Kim Ark was the first Supreme Court case to decide on the status of children born in the United States to alien parents. This decision established an important precedent in its interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco in 1873, had been denied re-entry to the United States after a trip abroad, under the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law banning virtually all Chinese immigration and prohibiting Chinese immigrants from becoming naturalized U.S. citizens. He challenged the government's refusal to recognize his citizenship, and the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, holding that the Citizenship Clause should be interpreted "in light of the common law". The case highlighted disagreements over the precise meaning of one phrase in the Citizenship Clause—namely, the provision that a person born in the United States who is "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" acquires automatic citizenship.

The Supreme Court's majority concluded that this phrase referred to being required to obey U.S. law; on this basis, they interpreted the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to grant citizenship to children born in the United States, with only a limited set of exceptions based on English common law. The Court held that being born to alien parents was not one of those exceptions. The court's dissenters argued that being subject to the jurisdiction of the United States meant not being subject to any foreign power—that is, not being claimed as a citizen by another country via jus sanguinis (inheriting citizenship from a parent)—an interpretation which, in the minority's view, would have excluded "the children of foreigners, happening to be born to them while passing through the country". (Full article...)

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See also: Lists of case law

More Did you know (auto-generated)

... that the legal battle over awarding channel 9 in Orlando, Florida, the longest case in FCC history at the time, filled 55 volumes?
... that the ballot summary for 2024 Ohio Issue 1 was a flashpoint for legal action?
... that Hirsch Sommerhausen worked as a court translator in a dozen languages?
... that fridges filled with "frozen duck" sent to Britain actually contained illegal coins?
... that until a 1982 legal decision, women were not permitted to stand at the bar at El Vino in London?
... that President Ieremia Tabai of Kiribati was elected in 1978, 1982, 1983 and 1987, although his eligibility for the fourth term was subject to a legal challenge?

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General images

The following are images from various law-related articles on Wikipedia.

Image 1Thomas Aquinas was the most influential Western medieval legal scholar. (from Jurisprudence)
Image 2The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution for a country, containing 444 articles, 12 schedules, numerous amendments and 117,369 words (from Legal history)
Image 3Mill believed law should create happiness. (from Jurisprudence)
Image 4Aristotle, by Francesco Hayez (from Jurisprudence)
Image 5Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail of The School of Athens (from Jurisprudence)
Image 6King John of England signs the Magna Carta (from Legal history)
Image 7Oliver Wendell Holmes was a self-styled legal realist. (from Jurisprudence)
Image 8Gratian (from Judiciary)
Image 9Lady Justice (Latin: Justicia), symbol of the judiciary. Statue at Shelby County Courthouse, Memphis, Tennessee (from Judiciary)
Image 10The Supreme Court Building houses the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. (from Judiciary)
Image 11Bentham's utilitarian theories remained dominant in law until the twentieth century. (from Jurisprudence)
Image 12"With law shall land be built", from the Code of Jutland (1241) above the Copenhagen Court House, Denmark (from Legal history)
Image 13Image of pages from the Decretum of Burchard of Worms, an 11th-century book of canon law (from Canon law)
Image 14Corpus Iuris Civilis, 1607 (from Judiciary)
Image 15Philosophers of law ask "what is law, and what should it be?" (from Jurisprudence)

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