Federal jurisdiction refers to the legal scope of the government's powers in the United States of America.
A bill of attainder is an act of a legislature declaring a person, or a group of people, guilty of some crime, and punishing them, often without a trial. As with attainder resulting from the normal judicial process, the effect of such a bill is to nullify the targeted person's civil rights, most notably the right to own property, the right to a title of nobility, and, in at least the original usage, the right to life itself.
An ex post facto law is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences of actions that were committed, or relationships that existed, before the enactment of the law. In criminal law, it may criminalize actions that were legal when committed; it may aggravate a crime by bringing it into a more severe category than it was in when it was committed; it may change the punishment prescribed for a crime, as by adding new penalties or extending sentences; or it may alter the rules of evidence in order to make conviction for a crime likelier than it would have been when the deed was committed.
Proposed bills are often categorized into public bills and private bills. A public bill is a proposed law which would apply to everyone within its jurisdiction. This is unlike a private bill which is a proposal for a law affecting only a single person, group, or area, such as a bill granting a named person citizenship or, previously, granting named persons a legislative divorce. After a bill is enacted, these bills become public acts and private acts, respectively.
Ratification is a principal's approval of an act of its agent that lacked the authority to bind the principal legally. Ratification defines the international act in which a state indicates its consent to be bound to a treaty if the parties intended to show their consent by such an act. In the case of bilateral treaties, ratification is usually accomplished by exchanging the requisite instruments, and in the case of multilateral treaties, the usual procedure is for the depositary to collect the ratifications of all states, keeping all parties informed of the situation.
The primary and fundamental statement of laws in the Russian Federation is the Constitution of the Russian Federation.
Constitutionality is said to be the condition of acting in accordance with an applicable constitution; the status of a law, a procedure, or an act's accordance with the laws or set forth in the applicable constitution. When laws, procedures, or acts directly violate the constitution, they are unconstitutional. All others are considered constitutional unless the country in question has a mechanism for challenging laws as unconstitutional.
A local ordinance is a law issued by a local government. such as a municipality, county, parish, prefecture, or the like.
Dominican law theorists make a fundamental distinction between primary sources of law, which can give rise to binding legal norms, and secondary sources, sometimes called authorities. The primary sources are enacted law and custom, with the former overwhelmingly more important. Sometimes, “general principles of law” are also considered a primary source. Authorities may have weight when primary sources are absent, unclear, or incomplete, but they are never binding, and they are neither necessary nor sufficient as the basis for a judicial decision. Case law and the writings of legal scholars are as such secondary sources.
The government of the U.S. State of Oklahoma, established by the Oklahoma Constitution, is a republican democracy modeled after the federal government of the United States. The state government has three branches: the executive, legislative, and judicial. Through a system of separation of powers or "checks and balances," each of these branches has some authority to act on its own, some authority to regulate the other two branches, and has some of its own authority, in turn, regulated by the other branches.
Calder v. Bull, 3 U.S. 386 (1798), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court decided four important points of constitutional law.
Proposition 218 is an adopted initiative constitutional amendment which revolutionized local and regional government finance and taxation in California. Named the "Right to Vote on Taxes Act," it was sponsored by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association as a constitutional follow-up to the landmark property tax reduction initiative constitutional amendment, Proposition 13, approved in 1978. Proposition 218 was approved and adopted by California voters during the November 5, 1996, statewide general election.
The law of Malaysia is mainly based on the common law legal system. This was a direct result of the colonisation of Malaya, Sarawak, and North Borneo by Britain between the early 19th century to the 1960s. The supreme law of the land—the Constitution of Malaysia—sets out the legal framework and rights of Malaysian citizens.
In French politics, an ordonnance is a statutory instrument issued by the Council of Ministers in an area of law normally reserved for primary legislation enacted by the French Parliament. They function as temporary statutes pending ratification by the Parliament; failing ratification they function as mere executive regulations.
Judicial review is a process under which executive, legislative and administrative actions are subject to review by the judiciary. A court with authority for judicial review may invalidate laws, acts and governmental actions that are incompatible with a higher authority: an executive decision may be invalidated for being unlawful or a statute may be invalidated for violating the terms of a constitution. Judicial review is one of the checks and balances in the separation of powers: the power of the judiciary to supervise the legislative and executive branches when the latter exceed their authority. The doctrine varies between jurisdictions, so the procedure and scope of judicial review may differ between and within countries.
Canadian Western Bank v Alberta [2007] 2 S.C.R. 3 is a landmark decision in Canadian constitutional law by the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) relating to the division of powers between Federal and Provincial legislative bodies.
De Veau v. Braisted, 363 U.S. 144 (1960), is a 5-to-3 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States that an interstate compact restricting convicted felons from holding union office is not preempted by the National Labor Relations Act or the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, does not violate the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, and is not an ex post facto law or bill of attainder in violation of Article One, Section 10 of the Constitution.
Primary legislation and secondary legislation are two forms of law, created respectively by the legislative and executive branches of governments in representative democracies. Primary legislation generally consists of statutes, also known as 'acts', that set out broad outlines and principles, but delegate specific authority to an executive branch to make more specific laws under the aegis of the principal act. The executive branch can then issue secondary legislation, creating legally enforceable regulations and the procedures for implementing them.
Bank Markazi v. Peterson, 578 U.S. ___ (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case that found that a law which only applied to a specific case, identified by docket number, and eliminated all of the defenses one party had raised does not violate the separation of powers in the United States Constitution between the legislative (Congress) and judicial branches of government. The plaintiffs, in the case had initially obtained judgments against Iran for its role in supporting state-sponsored terrorism, particularly the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings and 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, and sought execution against a bank account in New York held, through European intermediaries, on behalf of Bank Markazi, the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The plaintiffs obtained court orders preventing the transfer of funds from the account in 2008 and initiated their lawsuit in 2010. Bank Markazi raised several defenses, including that the account was not an asset of the bank, but rather an asset of its European intermediary, under both New York state property law and §201(a) of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. In response to concerns that existing laws were insufficient for the account to be used to settle the judgments, Congress added an amendment to a 2012 bill, codified after enactment as 22 U.S.C. § 8772, that identified the pending lawsuit by docket number, applied only to the assets in the identified case, and effectively abrogated every legal basis available to Bank Markazi to prevent the plaintiffs from executing their claims against the account. Bank Markazi then argued that § 8772 was an unconstitutional breach of the separation of power between the legislative and judicial branches of government, because it effectively directed a particular result in a single case without changing the generally applicable law. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and, on appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit both upheld the constitutionality of § 8772 and cleared the way for the plaintiffs to execute their judgments against the account, which held about $1.75 billion in cash.
Proposition 218 is an adopted initiative constitutional amendment in the state of California that appeared on the November 5, 1996, statewide election ballot. Proposition 218 revolutionized local and regional government finance in California. Called the “Right to Vote on Taxes Act,” Proposition 218 was sponsored by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association as a constitutional follow-up to the landmark Proposition 13 property tax revolt initiative constitutional amendment approved by California voters on June 6, 1978. Proposition 218 was drafted by constitutional attorneys Jonathan Coupal and Jack Cohen.
