This content is released as a draft version for comment by the scholarly community. Please do not distribute.
Administrative Law
Administrative laws are regulations promulgated by administrative agencies. The authority to create these regulations that have the force of law comes from the delegated power of Congress to make laws. These agencies are usually created by legislative bodies to regulate areas that are very technical. For example, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) notoriously has the power to establish regulations that have the force of law. Both the federal government and the governments of the states have established these sorts of agencies.
Case Law
The development of the common law was accomplished through the decisions of judges. The importance of judges in specifying the exact nature of the law has been maintained from this common law tradition. The importance of judicial decisions in the development of the common law was so important that the terms case law and common law are sometimes used interchangeably. Under the common law tradition, nearly every law was judge-made law. In modern America, many areas of law have come to be dominated by legislatures. In most states, for example, criminal law is said to be “entirely a matter of statute.” Even when the letter of the law comes to us from statutory provisions, the legal context for understanding those statutes is still provided by case law.
Modification History File Created: 08/04/2018 Last Modified: 08/04/2018
This work is licensed under an Open Educational Resource-Quality Master Source (OER-QMS) License.
