Wk 7 DB

Judge-made Rules
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There are two main categories of law. One of them is statute law. This law comprises of the written law available in the constitution and those governing certain bodies in the legal department (Zalman, 2011). The second one is law based on precedents. Precedents are past actions or events that can be useful as guidance and examples in similar situations. In the law, judicial precedents are made by judges and constitute rulings made in the past, to justify judgments in the present (Zalman, 2011). Judges have the mandate to introduce rules through the provisions they make on cases when need be. These precedents account for issues and situations for which the statutes in the written law do not account.
The judge-made rules constitute judicial precedents (Zalman, 2011). They exist for a reason and do not overrule the statute law. Therefore, laying them to rest permanently is not a wise move. The reason those rules exist is that the judges and other legal parties saw the gaps that exist in statute law and found a way to fill them. The same way that they did, felons and criminals are bound to manipulate the legal system if these precedents and judge-made rules do not exist. These rules ensure that any claims by potential criminals of violations of due process do not suffice and compromise the security of people. The law has provisions where those rules do not apply depending on the nature of the situation. Although the courts have been loosening these strict provisions of due process, they cannot be gone completely.

There still needs to be a significant level of the rules to ensure that no party suffers wrongly and that the law is respected.

Reference
Zalman, M. (2011). Criminal procedure: Constitution and society. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Pearson/Prentice Hall