It is said that law in UK is consisted of many laws (?) So how do people understand law if there is no single book to know what is allowed and what is not?
I’m very confused.
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In the unusual event that an entirely new matter is before a judge, they can set a precedent, or choose to state that their ruling not be used as a “test case” if they feel their were highly unusual aspects or circumstances. Likewise, they can diverge from president for the same reason.
All judgements can be appealed, or reviewed, a review will not quash a sentence, but may become part of precedent.
Basically for every offense there is a specific law that was created defining what was criminal about the activity, so very little is left for the judges to determine and where there is uncertainty previous cases set up a precedent for how new cases should be handled.
The UK has three separate legal systems. One for Northern Ireland, one for Scotland and one for England and Wales.
The Northern Irish one is based off the English system (as are many legal systems around the world, including the US) so it works in a similar way. But the Scottish one is quite different as Scotland had a well developed legal system from before it became part of the UK.
As the other answer says, law is largely based on precedent. Parliament makes the laws, but it’s up to judges to interpret them and their rulings are applied to future cases with similar circumstances. (I’m not sure to what extent this also applies to Scotland, as I said their system is quite different).
The UK is unusual in that it has an “uncodified” constitution. That means instead of having an explicitly defined constitution like most countries, the UK’s constitution is made up of many pieces of legislation, treaties and conventions that have been made over the centuries. The constitution is just the sum of all laws which define how the state works.
As for how people are expected to know the law, it’s not really any different to any other country. All countries have lots of laws, and there’s no way anyone could know all of them. The basics are pretty simple though, and a lot of laws relate to very specific things which you don’t need to know about unless you’re involved in that specific thing.
It’s based on precedent – something similar happened before, and this was the outcome *then*, so that should be the outcome *now*.
Obviously, it’s a bit more complex than that, and laws get passed by Governments to introduce new laws to update previous versions, but there’s a lot of legal precedents involved.
Better to r/askuk about this.
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