Legal Definitions - make law

To make law refers to the process by which new legal rules, principles, or requirements are established within a jurisdiction. This fundamental function can occur primarily through the actions of legislative bodies or through the decisions issued by courts.

• Legislative Action: This is the most common understanding of "making law," where elected representatives in a legislative body (such as a national parliament, state legislature, or city council) draft, debate, and pass bills that become statutes or ordinances. These new laws introduce specific obligations, rights, or prohibitions for individuals, businesses, and government entities.

  Example: A state legislature, responding to concerns about data privacy, passes a new bill requiring all companies operating within the state to obtain explicit consent from users before collecting their personal data. This new statute also grants users the right to request deletion of their data. By enacting this legislation, the state legislature is actively making law, establishing new legal duties for businesses and new rights for consumers that did not previously exist in that jurisdiction.

• Judicial Precedent: Courts also "make law" through their rulings, particularly when they interpret existing statutes, apply legal principles to novel situations, or clarify the scope of constitutional rights. When a higher court issues a decision that establishes a new legal principle or clarifies the application of an existing law, that decision becomes a binding precedent for lower courts, effectively creating a new rule of law that must be followed in similar future cases.

  Example: A nation's highest court hears a case involving a dispute over intellectual property rights for a new type of genetic modification. There are no existing statutes specifically addressing this novel technology. The court rules that the unique genetic sequence, when developed through a specific inventive process, can be protected under existing patent law principles, even though the original patent laws were drafted long before such technology existed. In doing so, the court makes law by interpreting and extending existing legal frameworks to cover a new scientific development, setting a precedent for how similar genetic inventions will be treated under intellectual property law in the future.