D. Make list of rights that that prisoners enjoy in this country.

Unit V: “Types of Law”

Exercise 1. Read, translate and remember the following words and word

Combinations.

Dealing, obligation, estate, wrong, injury, tort, offender, apparent, assign, bound, coherent, consistency, enforce, equity, failing, fair, fine, handle, intervene, loss, proper, operation, practitioner, prior.

Exercise 2. Translate the following word combinations

And read them fluently.

regulations governing business dealing and personal obligations, real estate laws, private wrongs, financial loss, drunk driving accidents, to establish guilt and assign punishment, guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, rough and relatively recent, apparent failings, rationally organized society, demand for logical consistency, specific situations.

Types of Law

In the United States there are two types of law – civil and criminal.

Civil law consists of regulations governing business and personal obligations. It includes contract and real estate laws. It is primarily concerned with the control of property.

Tort law is a sub-type of civil law concerned with private wrongs that result in injury of financial loss. Many crimes (e.g., drunk driving accidents) can also be defined as torts so offenders can be sued by the victim in civil court as well as prosecuted by the government in criminal court. Civil suits fix the level of loss and compensate the victim. Criminal trails are intended to establish guilt and assign punishment.

Criminal laws define and punish public wrongs. The operation of criminal law is different from civil law in three major ways. First, criminal law requires more proof for conviction than does civil law (i.g., guilt beyond a resonable doubt). The rules that determine what evidence may be introduced in court are much stricter in criminal trails than in civil ones for this reason also. Second, the state brings criminal charges and receives monetary payments (fines) from the guilty person. In civil cases the injured person or business performs this role. Finally, civil penalties almost always center on the distribution of money or other property. Most crimes are punished with a loss of freedom or life. Because life and freedom are considered to be more valuable than property by American culture, the stakes are higher in criminal trail than in a civil one. This fact is frequently used to justify the higher standard of proof required in criminal cases. The division between criminal and civil law is rough and relatively recent. There are several other divisions in the sources of legal rules. Examination of these can help link the idea of law to that of justice as well as explain many of its apparent failings.

Virtually all humans recognize some sort of natural law. Natural law is any philosophy concerning the nature of proper behavior and justice that is felt to be suitable in a rationally organized society. It is usually attributed to powers superior to man or society (e.g., God, nature) and stresses morality and logic. Common law often arises from natural law. It is a body of customs, traditions and prior decisions that are recognized as binding on a specific group of people and uses group traditions (e.g., religion) as its philosophical basis. It serves to unify tribal beliefs into a coherent legal system and provides more stability and consistency than does natural law. Equity is concerned with the equal and fair treatment of persons. It is an appeal to social concepts of fairness that was used by the Romans and early Britons. Equity began as a supplement to common law principles that allowed royalty to intervene in legal disputes. It relies almost entirely on intuition and is not bound by prior decisions or a demand for logical consistency and is thus much less predictable than common law.

Neither Common law nor equity principles need to be written down (i.e., codified) in order to be effective. However, to meet the criteria for effective modern law, government authorities need to provide a logically organized, easily distributed and consistently worded set of rules for legal decision-making. The written decrees that fill this need are generally referred to as statutory laws. Statutory laws include both substantive criminal law and procedural law. Statutory law refers to the rules that are created by acts of legislatures and other governmental bodies. Substantive law is that part of the law which defines and regulates the rights and duties of persons. It includes not only criminal law, but also civil contract law, tort law, law of wills (i.e., probate law), etc. Procedural law, on the other hand, describes the proper methods of enforcing persons’ rights or correcting their violation. It governs the behavior of the agencies and practitioners that carry out legal actions dealing with crime. Case law is used to fill in the gaps between the formal principle (written law) and the specific circumstances of concrete cases brought before a court by using court decisions to interpret and apply specific laws and principles. It consists of judicial interpretations of law supplied by appellate courts in written decisions. Contradictions between laws are also handled through case law decisions. Case Law is guided by the principle of stare decisis which translates as let the decision stand and encourages judges to use prior decisions to guide their application of laws and legal principles to the specific situations brought before them.

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