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U.S. Laws Americans Have Been Gathering Together Essay

¶ … U.S. Laws Americans have been gathering together to make laws since the colonial times. This process is continued today in order to maintain a well-regulated society. Even though specific procedures for creating law have developed over time, democratic law-making remains marked by a necessitate to have the approval of the people, a system of checks and balances, and public policy elasticity matched to the problems of time and place (Bakken, n.d.).

This everyday law-making process is part of a historical development that is English in origin. When English colonists in colonial America put into practice the law-making heritage that they brought with them, they made definite changes to suit their new surroundings. The King of England granted charters to individual landowners and joint stock companies of entrepreneurs for the various colonies affording varying degrees of law-making power, but all English colonists had law without current charters and colonial statutes. They had their ancient constitution, the mostly unwritten law of England known as the English common law, which banned government from mistreating the rights of Englishmen. Included in this common law was Magna Charta which was the charter signed by King John in 1215, which guaranteed due process of law, the guard of property rights, and access to a jury. The decisive center of the ancient English law was the association between private property and liberty. Private property in landholdings had received preferential legal protection and definition since the 14th century, but English history and the American colonial experience created a clear sense in American...

Under the common-law system, when a court make a decision and reports its decision concerning a particular case, the case becomes part of the body of law and can be used in later cases concerning similar matters. This use of precedence is known as stare decisis. Common law has been governed in the courts of England since the Middle Ages; it is also found in the U.S. And in most of the British Commonwealth (Common Law, 2012).
Common law's agreement has been accredited to the fact that law is grounded in and rationally derived from a handful of general principles and that these subject-areas are distinguished by some widespread principles or elements which fix the boundaries of the subject. The exhibition of these general principles and the methods required to find and to apply them and the rules that they under-pin are mainly what legal education and scholarship in the common law tradition are all about. The spirit of common law is not in specific decisions or in rules extracted from them but in expansive notions which are hard to unify or arrange but which may certainly in some way woven into the foundation of life (Description and History of Common Law, n.d.).

Judges interpret and apply the law but do not create it for the law has no individual authors. It is the creation of the community grounded in…

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References

Bakken, G.M. (n.d.). The Creation of Law in a Democratic Society. Retrieved from http://www.ait.org.tw/infousa/zhtw/DOCS/Demopaper/dmpaper5.html

Common Law. (2012). Retrieved from http://www.answers.com/topic/common-law

Description and History of Common Law. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.radford.edu/~junnever/law/commonlaw.htm
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