Lessons · Law foundations · statute, regulation, case law
Three kinds of written law, and which one to read first
A statute is text a legislature passed, a regulation is the detail an agency wrote under a statute, and case law is what courts have decided and why.
Hone is a place to practise a career, one idea a day. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.
What it is for
A supervisor asks for everything on a question and gets back three printed court decisions and nothing else. The statute those decisions were reading was never pulled, so nobody in the file knows what the words actually say, only what three courts said about them.
How to think about it
Work from the most general text to the most particular reading of it: the statute, then anything written under it, then the decisions applying it, and note for each one what it is and who made it.
Worked example
Statute: the text a legislature passed and published.The starting point. It says what the rule is in the words that were voted on.
Regulation: the working detail an agency wrote under the authority of a statute.Filling in what the statute left to an agency. It cannot go further than the statute allows.
Decisions: what a court decided in a real dispute, with the reasons.Courts apply the text to facts, and the reasons are what later readers use.
Reading order on a file note: statute, then regulation, then the decisions reading them.So the note says what the rule is before it says what anybody thought of it.
Your turn
Write the usual name for the body of law made of court decisions rather than of enacted text.
Law built from decided cases: law
Solve one, graded on the server
The trap
Treating a printed regulation as if it outranked the statute it was written under. It is written under the statute and lives inside it, so a regulation that goes further than the statute allows is open to challenge.