I. Draw the pyramid of the federal courts and write down all the names of the courts. Do the same with the system of courts in your country.

II. Make the plan of the text.

TEXT 5

I. Read the following text. Comment on its title.

The Sources of English Law

I. The courts are the interpreters and declarers of the law, the "sources" of law are therefore the sources to which the courts turn in order to determine what it is. Considered from the aspect of their sources, laws are traditionally divided into two main categories according to the solemnity of the form in which they are made. They may either be written or unwritten. These traditional terms are misleading, because the expression "written" law signifies any law that is formally enacted, whether reduced to writing or not, and the expression "unwritten" law signifies all unenacted law. For example, as will appear, judicial decisions are often reduced to writing in the form of law reports, but because they are not formal enactments they are "unwritten" law.

Since the fashion was set by the Code Napoleon many continental countries have codified much of their law, public and private, on the Continent, therefore, the volume of written law tends to preponderate over the volume of unwritten. But in England unwritten law is predominant, for more of their law derives from judicial precedents than from legislative enactment. This does not, of course, mean that none of their law is codified for many parts of it are, such as the law relating to the sale of goods (Sale of Goods Act 1979) and the law relating to partnership (Partnership Act 1890). All that is meant is that, as yet at least, although Parliament casts increasing multitudes of statutes upon English people, they have not adopted the system of wholesale codification which prevails in many continental countries.

Two principal and two subsidiary sources of English law must be mentioned. These principal sources are Legislation, and Judicial Precedent, the subsidiary sources are Custom and Books of Authority.

Legislation is enacted law. In England the ultimate legislator is Parliament, for in English traditional constitutional theory Parliament is sovereign. It means that all legislative power within the realm is vested in Parliament, or is derived from the authority of Parliament - Parliament thus has no rival within the legislative sphere - and it means secondly that there is no legal limit to the power of Parliament. Parliament may therefore, and constantly does, by Act delegate legislative powers to other bodies and even to individuals but it may also, by Act, remove these powers as simply as it has conferred them. By Act, moreover, Parliament may make any laws it pleases however perverse or "wrong" and the courts are bound to apply them. The enactments of Parliament are not subject to question, for English constitution knows no entranced rights similar to the fundamental liberties guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States and safeguarded by the Supreme Court.

II. In all countries, at all times, the decisions of courts are treated with respect, and they tend to be regarded as "precedents which subsequent courts will follow when they are called upon to determine issues of a similar kind.

This reliance upon precedent has been both the hallmark and the strength of the common law. Its rules have been evolved inductively from decision to decision involving similar facts, so that they are firmly grounded upon the actualities of litigation and the reality of human conduct. And new cases lead onwards to reach toward to new rules. Its principles are, to employ a popular phrase "open ended", they are not firm and inflexible decrees. This characteristic of the common law contrasts, again, with the European civil law. There, harking back to the tradition of the Corpus Juris, law is characteristically derived from a code, that is, from an enacted body of rules either (as in the case of Justinian's or of Napoleon's legislation) embodying the whole of, or some considerable part of, the law, or embracing some special aspect of it. Thus the task of the courts is deductive: to subsume the present case under the mantle of the generalized and codified rule. The ward "codification" was an invention of the ingenious Jeremy Bentham (1743-1832). In principle this method carries the danger that the encoded rule may, being the work of a theorist divorced from reality, be out of touch with actual needs, and certainly, as noted above, in course of time it may become so, and thus may require judicial adaptation to meet changed conditions. So, although the approach to legal decision is on the one hand inductive at common law and on the other hand deductive in the civil law, in reality (apart from interpretive method) the two systems are not quite so divergent as might appear. One thing, however, which is distinctive of the English system, is that because the English judge has, through precedent, power to make new law his position in the legal system is central.