Legal rules - Topics

Can a court treat a voluntary guideline as the benchmark for negligence? What makes one legal rule outrank another when both are perfectly valid? Who gets to say what an ambiguous legal rule always meant? What happens when the written law says one thing and everyone's habit says another? 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? What happens when a regulation goes further than its parent statute ever authorised? What does it mean when a section is repealed but everyone still cites it? Customary international law: how a practice becomes binding with nobody signing anything Judge-made law vs legislation: who really fills the gaps Why do transitional provisions matter more than the main text of a statute? Why can a legal principle override a clear rule in a hard case? What happens when a guideline contradicts the rule it was meant to explain? Is international law actually law if there is no world police? Common law vs code-based systems: why one leans on precedent and the other on statutes Who decides what counts as law before any court has ruled on it? 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? Does the fact that everyone believes something is illegal make it illegal? Reading a case report: which parts of a judgment are actually binding Why do statutes get amended by inserting sections instead of being rewritten cleanly? What is the point of codifying scattered statutes into a single code? Can a statute be struck down for being too vague to apply? Is an ordinance passed by referendum harder to repeal than one passed by council? Do departmental rules bind the courts or only the agencies that issued them? Is a rule with no sanction behind it still a legal rule? If a guideline is not legally binding why does ignoring it still cause trouble? Why a country can sign a treaty and then fail to implement it at home Why states are the main subjects of international law and individuals mostly are not Can a company's bylaws override a deal shareholders signed separately? Why do two firms with the same violation end up with very different penalties? Why an environmental fine is often cheaper than complying