Public law

Public law concerns the relationships of individuals to their governments and societies. This contrasts with private law, which refers to legal dealings between individuals or private institutions, such as corporations. Public law encompasses several subdivisions. Constitutional law, for instance, is a form of public law that interprets the meaning of a government's constitution as it applies to citizens. Tax law manages a government's rules of taxation, administrative law oversees the operations of public administrative agencies, and criminal law defines illegal actions and the punishments for those actions. These areas involve public institutions or the public to some degree. Some legal areas, however, require the application of both public and private law.

Background

Public law is a general term that refers broadly to the laws regulating government power. Public law addresses exactly which individuals or institutions wield this power, what the power involves, how the power is used and regulated, and how individuals are affected by the exercise of this power. The regulation of government power is important to public law. Therefore, public lawyers seek to learn how government institutions are held accountable for their actions.

Public law is closely connected to the procedures and operations of politics and government. Public lawyers must be familiar with and interested in the political system of their respective country, so they can correctly assess matters of public law. It is important that lawyers stay informed of contemporary issues in their countries' political and governmental arenas. Changing political climates, for example, can lead to new laws, which are then absorbed into the system of public law.

Public lawyers must ensure that governments treat individuals fairly since governments are the only bodies in the world that can legislate on human rights. Individuals who believe their government violated the law can seek a judicial review of the government's actions to determine if any wrongdoing took place. At the same time, public lawyers must hold lawbreaking citizens accountable to the established laws of their city, state, and country.

Because of the breadth of the legal areas they cover, some matters are subject to both public and private law. Issues of employment law are an example. Employment contracts between employer and employee are managed under private law, while workplace health and safety are subjects of public law. This occasional overlap has led some legal scholars to define public law more specifically as the legal discipline that oversees the actions of public institutions, such as governments, that exercise power unilaterally. Public law ensures this power is applied properly.

Overview

Numerous subdivisions are contained under the general discipline of public law. Each subdivision is its own legal school, and public lawyers usually specialize in one. The subdivision of constitutional law interprets the prescriptions of a government's written constitution. Constitutional law in the United States ensures that the civil rights guaranteed to American citizens by the US Constitution are applied equally throughout the country by individual state governments and the federal government.

The US Constitution covers a wide range of legal areas, from the organization of the federal government to the civil liberties of the people. All Constitution amendments become part of the document's legal framework and therefore laws of the land. The Supreme Court is the highest authority on matters of constitutional law in the United States. It settles constitutional questions that cannot be decided in lower courts. A famous example of the Supreme Court applying constitutional law to a legal dispute is the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education. The court had to decide whether state laws that created separate schools for White students and African American students violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all Americans. The court ultimately ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional, and states then had to begin desegregating their schools.

Administrative law is another subdivision of public law. It is composed of the laws created by the individual agencies and other bodies of a national or state government. The agencies are obliged to carry out the laws enacted by a national, state, or other local legislature. Administrative law is made up of the supplementary regulations and rules passed by these agencies to implement the legislature's laws. In the United States, administrative law can be found in the rules overseeing the distribution of government benefits. The Social Security Administration (SSA) is an administrative government agency tasked with executing Congress's laws mandating that certain Americans receive financial assistance from the federal government. While the SSA must perform this duty as required by Congress, it creates its own rules and protocols controlling exactly how the process will operate. Any disagreements between the agencies and individuals are matters of administrative law. Lawyers who specialize in this area sort through the details of these cases to determine which party is correct.

A third major subdivision of public law is criminal law, which dictates the punishments for individuals who violate the law by committing crimes. Criminal law details exactly which actions or inactions are illegal in a certain jurisdiction and what the appropriate punishments are for those illegal acts. The punishments of criminal law are structured as hierarchies. Severe punishments are reserved for major crimes. In the United States, speeding and blocking traffic are considered minor offenses that are punishable by fines. Meanwhile, murder is a serious crime that can carry a punishment of imprisonment or death.

Criminal laws vary greatly throughout the fifty US states and world. Crimes are punishable only by the criminal statutes governing the jurisdiction where the crimes were committed. The exact wordings of criminal laws are important in the prosecution of criminals, since attorneys must be able to prove the individuals intentionally committed the crimes. For instance, in the United States, the primary difference between the crimes of first-degree murder and manslaughter is intent. While first-degree murder is a killing performed with malicious intent, manslaughter is an accidental killing resulting from negligence. A suspected criminal who goes to trial usually hires defense teams to prove to a jury that he or she is either innocent or deserving of a lighter sentence, while prosecutors attempt to prove the suspect's guilt.

Bibliography

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