Legal rules - Topics

What makes one legal rule outrank another when both are perfectly valid? Who gets to say what an ambiguous legal rule always meant? Can a court treat a voluntary guideline as the benchmark for negligence? How do you read a statute whose subsections have been renumbered three times? When a case fits the letter of a rule but defeats its purpose which one wins? Why can a legal principle override a clear rule in a hard case? Customary international law: how a practice becomes binding with nobody signing anything What happens when the written law says one thing and everyone's habit says another? What happens when a regulation goes further than its parent statute ever authorised? Why do transitional provisions matter more than the main text of a statute? Is an ordinance passed by referendum harder to repeal than one passed by council? Judge-made law vs legislation: who really fills the gaps What does it mean when a section is repealed but everyone still cites it? Common law vs code-based systems: why one leans on precedent and the other on statutes Is international law actually law if there is no world police? Why states are the main subjects of international law and individuals mostly are not If a guideline is not legally binding why does ignoring it still cause trouble? Is a rule with no sanction behind it still a legal rule? What happens when a guideline contradicts the rule it was meant to explain? Who decides what counts as law before any court has ruled on it? Does the fact that everyone believes something is illegal make it illegal? Reading a case report: which parts of a judgment are actually binding What is the point of codifying scattered statutes into a single code? Can a statute be struck down for being too vague to apply? Can a country be bound by a rule it voted against? Do voluntary standards ever become binding through a contract or an insurer? Why a country can sign a treaty and then fail to implement it at home Do departmental rules bind the courts or only the agencies that issued them? What are the elements of a legal rule and why do courts recite them one by one? Can a legal rule reach conduct that happened before the rule existed? Is following the guideline always a defence when something goes wrong? Why do statutes get amended by inserting sections instead of being rewritten cleanly?