Sources of Law under the American Jurisprudence System

Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign? Five Man Electrical Band, 1970

Introduction

The American jurisprudence system is comprised of a vast network of federal, state and local entities which create, administer and adjudicate tens of thousands of laws, regulations and statutes. Notwithstanding the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Tenth Amendments constitutional guarantee that, The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the people, most Americans recognize that scarcely any aspect of daily life in the United States today is not covered, at least in part, by some type of federal or state law as reflected in the epigraph above. Against this backdrop, it is important to understand where all of these laws come from and why they continue to proliferate in the American jurisprudence system. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to describe the major sources of law in the United States as well as how these different sources of law can complement or conflict with each other. Finally, a discussion concerning a hypothetical clients case involving a conflict between laws is followed by a summary of the research in the conclusion.

Major Sources of Law

The major sources of law under the American jurisprudence system are, in descending order of priority, the U.S. Constitution and then state constitutions as well as various statutes, regulations and case law that establish legal precedent which can be applied to similar cases in the future. Some definitional clarity is provided by Blacks Law Dictionary concerning these primary sources of law as noted below:

Constitution: The organic and fundamental law of a nation or state, which may be written or unwritten, establishing the character and concept of its government, laying the basic principles to which its internal life is to be conformed, organizing the government, and regulating, distributing, and limiting the functions of its different departments, and prescribing the extent and manner of the exercise of sovereign powers (p. 311).

Statute: A formal written enactment of a legislative body, whether federal, state, city, or county [which is] an act of the legislature declaring, commanding, or prohibiting something (p. 1410).

Regulation: A rule or order prescribed for management of government; a regulating principle; a precept (p. 1286).

Case law: The aggregate of reported cases as forming a body of jurisprudence, or the law of a particular subject as evidenced or formed by the adjudged cases, in distinction to statutes and other sources of law which includes reported cases that interpret statutes, regulations, and constitutional provisions (p. 216).

In addition, the power to make new laws, statutes and regulations, amend existing ones...

…Wyoming do not. This means that a client from South Carolina can commit one of the crimes listed as a hate crime under federal law, such as murder of someone from another race or religion, in either of these two states and only be charged with the original crime at the state level; however, because of the Supremacy Clause, federal authorities can also charge this client with a more severe hate crime as well (Federal laws and statutes, 2022). Likewise, in the event that clients commit a hate crime in another state with hate crime laws on its book but which declines to charge them for a hate crime, federal authorities can still elect to charge them for the more severe crime.

Conclusion

With tens of thousands of federal, state and local laws of the books, the research showed that the United States earned its reputation as a land of laws the hard way. The research also showed that the major sources of law under the American jurisprudence system are the U.S. Constitution, state constitutions and statutes, regulations and precedential case laws. In most cases, laws in the United States tend to complement each other but there are instances where conflict between laws occurs. In such cases, the research also showed that federal laws, including hate crime laws, take priority over state or local laws due to the U.S.…