Understanding Law: Sources, Regulations, and European Integration

Posted on Mar 18, 2025 in Law

Understanding the Law

Definition of Law

Law is a body of rules designed to guide human conduct. These rules are imposed upon and enforced among human beings within a specific territory and time frame.

Key characteristics:

  • Imposed by a sovereign body.
  • Regulates human behavior.
  • Enforced by courts of justice.
  • Applicable within specific territorial and temporal boundaries.

Divisions of Law

Law is broadly divided into two categories:

Public Law

  • Tax Law: Governs public levies on economic transactions.
  • Constitutional Law: Regulates fundamental rights, duties, and the structure of the state.
  • Criminal Law
  • Administrative Law: Regulates relations between the government and citizens.

Private Law

  • Civil Law: Concerns relationships between individuals.
  • Commercial Law: Deals with the sale or carriage of goods and employment/labor contracts, including workers’ rights and obligations.

Business Law

Business law encompasses the areas of law that form the legal environment within which business entities are created and operate.

Legal Regulation

Legal regulation (law) is imposed by public authorities and is aimed at anyone within a group, without distinction. It is coercive.

Classes of Regulation

Based on Content

  • Mandatory: Rules that must be applied and cannot be changed.
  • Non-Mandatory: Rules that can be altered, typically in the absence of a specific contractual provision.

Based on Field

  • General: Applied to society without distinctions.
  • Special: Addressed to a group with uniform characteristics within a wider population.
  • Exceptional: The standard applicable over both general and special rules.

Sources of Law

  • Statute Law: The primary source of legal provisions. It must be written, enacted, and published. Everyone is expected to know the provisions of statute law.
  • Customary Law: Repeated practices of behavior based on consensus. It is not dictated by a government and requires repetition and acceptance by the community.
  • General Principles of Law: Values that underpin customary and statute law, though not explicitly listed in any law.

Contradictions Between Legal Provisions

Sources

  1. Statute Law
  2. Customary Law
  3. General Principles of Law

Conflicts Within Statute Law

  1. Different Rank:
    1. Constitution
    2. Acts of Parliament
    3. Delegated Legislation
  2. Same Rank (Specialty Criteria):
    1. Exceptional
    2. Special
    3. General

If the contradiction cannot be overruled, temporality criteria are applied.

Conflicts with Rules of Autonomous Communities

These are resolved according to the principle of subject matter competence, with the Constitutional Court making the final decision.

European Integration: European Union

Conflicts Within EU Law

Resolved by the Court of Justice of the EU, according to:

  1. Principle of subject matter competence.
  2. Principle of supremacy of European Community Law: Member states have limited their sovereign rights and accepted a separate body of law that binds their national laws and themselves.

Components of EU Law

  1. Original EU Law: Treaties and international agreements between member states, including:
    • Treaties creating the European Communities.
    • Treaties on the European Union.
  2. Secondary EU Law:
    • EU Regulations: Apply directly and prevail over national law.
    • Decisions: Apply only to whom they are addressed.
    • Directives: Can create rights for individuals.