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Aloha! I am Professor Susan Jaworowski, bringing you this week's key terms for LAW 101. My
name is pronounced "jar-OW-ski," but some people find that hard to remember, so my students
call me Professor J as the name 'Dr. J' was already taken. The words I'm going to explain
in this video will help you understand this week's lectures in LAW 101.
Let's begin with the question: "if you were designing a government for a community from
scratch, what would it do?" The first thing I think I do is to set up some rules so we
could all get along - for example, so that people wouldn't bash each other over the head
when they wanted someone else's food. If the whole community agrees on these rules, you
have created the laws. In our government, the group of people who decide on those rules
is called the legislature. Next, what if someone breaks those laws? If
we had laws, but no ways to enforce them, the laws would be pretty useless. What we
need is a way to make sure that those laws are carried out, or executed. No, not that
kind of executed. One example of this is police officers, but there are more laws than just
laws that punish people. There are laws that make sure that there are people who help put
out fires, collect trash, and deliver the mail. The people whose job it is to carry
out the laws make up the executive branch of government.
But what if one people thinks she is following the law, and someone else thinks she isn?t?
What do we do when people disagree over who is complying with the law? What is both sides
think that they are right and the other guy is wrong? You need another branch of government
- you need a group of people who decide who is right. These people who have a special
role to hear both sides of an argument fairly and to make a decision as to which one of
them is more law abiding. These are judges, and the whole system of judges is called the
judicial branch, or sometimes the court system
Now if you have a small community, everyone in the whole group can take on all three of
these functions at the same time. But once your group gets larger and larger, it is very
difficult to have the whole group making laws, enforcing laws, and trying to decide who is
complying with these laws. So in our government, there are three specialized branches of government,
each carrying out one of these functions. These three groups are one way of organizing
our government to protect the health safety and welfare of our citizens. This certainly
isn't the only way to structure of government. You could have a king who does all three functions,
for example. But this three branch system helps provide that no single branch can take
over the government. We'll talk more about these "checks and balances" later on.
So our first vocabulary words are legislative branch, the people who make the laws, the
judicial branch, the people who decide who is following the laws, and the executive branch,
which are those who carry out the laws. We'll be discussing each of the branches in much
more detail in the coming weeks.
Now we have three related vocabulary words: jurisdiction, precedent, and common law. They
are related as each one builds on the one before it.
Jurisdiction. This is a word that has multiple meanings. It can relate to the power of the
courts - part of the judicial system - over a specific person or entity. Let's use me
as an example. If a court has jurisdiction over me, they can require that I come to a
hearing, and if they decide that I've done something wrong, they can give me the appropriate
punishment. However, however, not all courts in the United States have jurisdiction over
me, when they do any when they don't will be discussed in more detail in the LAW 111,
Litigation course. For this course, LAW 101, I'm more interested in sharing with you the
jurisdiction that courts have over each other. We'll look at the state system for this example.
Remember my caveman example. They go to a primitive Neanderthal court and the judge
there decides that this guy gets it. This is called the trial court. Many systems, including
the US states, allow a person who loses at the trial to ask for a second hearing in front
of a small panel of judges. This is called an appeal, and we'll cover the differences
between trials and appeals and some key details later this semester. What is important to
know now is that the state appeals court writes down an official opinion that explains their
decision. I'm going to use a metaphor here. The appeals court and the trial court in the
same jurisdiction have a relationship is like that of parents and children. Well, some families!
The children have to follow the rules set out by their parents. But the children do
can listen to - although they don't have to follow - the rules set by their friend's parents.
Each of the other states is like its own individual family. The rules of their parents - the rules
of their appeals courts - DO have to be followed by the other courts in their state 'family,'
but do NOT have to be followed by the courts of other states. So the courts of Hawaii could
listen to the courts of Texas or Oklahoma or any other state, but they don't have to
follow them.
Precedent - see the word precede within it, which means 'to come first,' refers to cases
from the appeals courts that the lower courts have to follow. When the appellate courts
make a decision on a case, they write it down and it goes into a book with their other opinions.
This precedent is the law that other courts within the jurisdiction - the same family
- must follow.
The vocabulary word that these two words have been building up to is common law. Common
law means the law that comes from the courts decisions - the precedent. 49 of the 50 states
in the United States are common law jurisdictions, because England, from where we get our law,
was a common law system (except for Louisiana because it was a former French colony). Following
the common law is not the only way to organize a judicial system, however. Two other ways
to organize the courts are by civil law and by religious law. We're not going to talk
about religious law in this course, but I do need to talk about civil law, because it
has two very different meanings, and I'll be using them in this class.
The first meaning of civil law is in contrast to common law. Civil law is the most prevalent
system of law around the world. In a civil law system, the central law is the statutes,
the law adopted by the Legislature. The courts have comparatively less power. Countries that
use civil law include France, Spain, Germany, Japan, and China. One of the reasons I bring
this up is because Americans often have a tendency to think all countries' legal systems
are exactly like ours and if they're any different, ours is better. It makes you a more educated
citizen of the world to know that other countries' governments can be organized in different
ways and still work.
The other reason I bring up the word civil law is because we will be using this second
definition quite a lot in our course, because it refers to one of two primary types of law
in the US. One type of law is criminal law. I find that most people understand the idea
of the criminal law system, as it's referred to in TV and movies. This is the system - and
I'll discuss it more in this week's lecture - in which we punish people with fines and
jail time for doing certain bad things, such as ***, speeding, and littering. The government
is the one who brings the case to court, on behalf of the rest of its citizens. The other
side of the system is civil law. Civil law, which is covered more in this week's lecture,
is when one person sues another, and involves individual rights. Civil law suits include
medical malpractice, divorce, and insurance disputes. We'll talk more about these different
types of civil law in the lecture - for now, as this is just the vocabulary video, I want
you to understand that "civil law" has two meanings, and the one used throughout this
course refers to individual rights, as opposed to criminal law.
And that's our vocabulary for this week!