How to best describe: all law, primary/secondary legislation, etc - with "laws", "acts", "statutes", "ordinances", etc? [closed]

Solution 1:

Here are the terms for the six items listed in the question, that are the least likely to be misunderstood by a generic English-speaking audience.

(a) The law (of this country) encompasses everything that is under discussion here. Note that in this use, the law is a mass noun. The countable noun laws is more likely to be understood to refer to statutes.

(b) The enactments with country-wide application, passed by a parliament or a similar legislature, are indeed the statutes. Using acts for that purpose is OK too, provided that the context makes clear that it is the acts of the parliament that are referred to. Using statutes as the general term is compatible with using act to refer to a particular item of legislation; one can, for example, say ‘Among the statutes enacted last year was the Act on XYZ’.

(c) On the basis of the statutes, the departments of the executive branch may issue regulations.

(d) The non-binding proclamations passed by a legislature are indeed resolutions.

(e) The governing bodies of cities, towns, counties, etc. may issue various ordinances for their territories. (This assumes that we are talking about administrative units, and not about the components of a federation, such as the states in the U.S.; the latter have legislatures that pass statutes.)

(f) A verdict, by itself, simply says which party has won a particular legal dispute, and no more. A sentence similarly specifies only what will happen to a particular criminal defendant. In the course of litigation, however, various judicial opinions may be issued, and these may provide precedents for future litigation. A country’s body of judicial opinions, taken collectively, is the caselaw of that country. It should be noted that the role of judicial opinions varies from one legal system to another: the caselaw is a very important (perhaps the most important) element of the law in the countries of the common-law tradition, much less so elsewhere.

To avoid possible misunderstandings, it may be worthwhile to repeat that this answer is about the default generic terminology, i.e. the terminology that that one should use when one doesn't know what country one's audience is from, and one is writing either about the law in general or about the law of a country that is not itself English-speaking. If one is writing about a particular country in which English is an official language, and/or one knows what terminology one's audience is used to, one should choose one's terms accordingly.