Branches of law

Criminal law is one part of public law. Other branches of public law are constitutional and administrative law, which include the organisation and jurisdiction of the courts and tribunals, and the process of legislation. 

Civil law has a number of branches. Most relevant to this book are contract, tort (delict in Scotland) and labour law. A contract is an agreement between parties which is enforceable at law. Most commercial law (for example, insurance) has a basis in contract. A tort is a breach of duty imposed by law and is often called a civil wrong. The two most frequently heard of torts are nuisance and trespass. However, the two most relevant to safety law are the torts of negligence and of breach of statutory duty. 

The various branches of law may overlap and interact. At Hazards, Bertha has a contract of employment with her employer, as has every employee and employer. An important implied term of such contracts is that an employer should take reasonable care for the safety of employees. If Bertha proves that Hazards were in breach of that duty, and that in consequence she suffered injury. Hazards will be liable in the tort of negligence. There could be potential criminal liability imder HSWA. Again, Hazards might discipline a foreman, or Bertha s workmates might refuse to work in the conditions, taking the situation into the field of industrial relations law. 

1 Statute law comprises those laws which are debated and made by Parliament. They are written and copies are available for all to purchase (from The Stationery Office (TSO)). Statute law is the law of the State and a breach of it is a criminal offence, hence it is sometimes referred to as criminal law. 

2 Common law originally referred to a system of law common across the whole country. However, its meaning has changed to encompass case law - the body of law based on judicial precedents, i.e. the decisions of judges in earlier cases are binding in similar later cases. It is not officially written but is recorded in Law Reports. 

Equity law supplements common law in that it deals with complaints against common law judgements where there may have been a distortion of justice, i.e. such as from undue influence by one party. 

There is some overlap between these categories, for example, statute law can rely on interpretations from common law and common law cases can rely on breach of statutory duty to support a claim. 

1 Public law - dealing with matters involving the State and relating to the protection and well being of the public at large whether directly or indirectly. Typical of these laws are  

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The growth of technology has, therefore, led to branches of law which are in their early stages of development. Environmental protection law, food and drug law, consumer protection law, and others are opportunities available to the lawyer trained in chemistry or chemical engineering. 

Determining the scope of a patent is usually a fairly technical pro-ceding and should be reserved for the specialist. The final answer must, of course, rest with the court of last resort. While the Supreme Court of the United States has the last say in the matter, it is rather seldom that a patent reaches the high court for adjudication. Both patent lawyers and judges find the determination of the question a difficult one, and even the examiners in the Patent Office, while the patent is pending, do not always have an easy time in deciding what is or is not patentable. Of course, the fact that lawyers often differ in their estimates of the scope of a patent makes for law suits. In this respect law suits on patents do not differ from those involving other branches of law. 

Intellectual property is the branch of law that protects and, indeed, encourages the creation of certain products of the human mind or intellect. This chapter is intended to provide a basic understanding and appreciation of intellectual property law, especially as it relates to patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in the remainder of the world (1).Issues and concerns particularly related to the drug discovery and development process are emphasized. 

There are two main branches of law of interest to the safety professional, civil and criminal. 

Each has a bearing on the conduct of both employers and employees while carrying out their work activities. Table 1.1 provides a comparison of some significant aspects of both branches of law and the following paragraphs discuss the key aspects in more detail. 

The criminal branch of law deals with offences against the state. The purpose of criminal law is to deter people from breaking the law and to punish them accordingly when they do, rather than to merely compensate the wronged party. Many types of criminal law exist for many different purposes and the most important of these in relation to fire and health and safety are as follows ... 

Product liability is a branch of law concerned with the duties of those who manufacture, design, install, import, distribute and sell products. There are both general and specific requirements at common law and under health and safety, consumer protection and food safety law. Factors such as product design, utilisation, information and quality control are important areas of risk management in this field. 

The branch of law that deals with compensation in connection with bilateral accidents is called torts. Torts are legal actions taken by a plaintiff vfho has suffered harm to recover damages from a defendant. In some cases both parties... 

It has become fashionable to prefix the names of disciplines with bio , as in biophysics, bioinfonnatics and so on, giving the impression that in order to deal with biological systems, a different kind of physics, or infonnation science, is needed. But there is no imperative for this necessity. Biological systems are often very complex and compartmentalized, and their scaling laws may be different from those familiar in inanimate systems, but this merely means that different emphases from those useful in dealing with large unifonn systems are required, not that a separate branch of knowledge should necessarily be developed. 

Copyright Deposit. The law requires that copies of every pubHshed work be submitted to the United States Copyright Office, which is a branch of the Library of Congress. The purpose of this requirement is to stock the shelves of the Hbrary. This requirement is usually satisfied as part of the registration process failure to make deposit may ultimately lead to a fine, but will not affect the existence of the copyright. 

Thermodynamics is the branch of science that embodies the principles of energy transformation in macroscopic systems. The general restrictions which experience has shown to apply to all such transformations are known as the laws of thermodynamics. These laws are primitive they cannot be derived from anything more basic. 

The most celebrated textual embodiment of the science of energy was Thomson and Tait s Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867). Originally intending to treat all branches of natural philosophy, Thomson and Tait in fact produced only the first volume of the Treatise. Taking statics to be derivative from dynamics, they reinterpreted Newton s third law (action-reaction) as conservation of energy, with action viewed as rate of working. Fundamental to the new energy physics was the move to make extremum (maximum or minimum) conditions, rather than point forces, the theoretical foundation of dynamics. The tendency of an entire system to move from one place to another in the most economical way would determine the forces and motions of the various parts of the system. Variational principles (especially least action) thus played a central role in the new dynamics. 

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. ... 

Thermodynamics is, in many ways, much like this modern science building. At the base of the science is a strong foundation. This foundation, which consists of the three laws, has withstood the probing and scrutiny of scientists for over a hundred and fifty years. It is still firm and secure and can be relied upon to support the many applications of the science. Relatively straightforward mathematical relationships based upon these laws tie together a myriad of applications in all branches of science and engineering. In this series, we will focus on chemical applications, but even with this limitation, the list is extensive. 

Gamer and Hailes [462] postulated a chain branching reaction in the decomposition of mercury fulminate, since the values of n( 10—20) were larger than could be considered consistent with power law equation [eqn. (2)] obedience. If the rate of nucleation is constant (0 = 1 for the generation of a new nuclei at a large number of sites, N0) and there is a constant rate of branching of existing nuclei (ftB), the nucleation law is... 

Taphonomy is the branch of science that studies the processes of decay and fossilization of the remains of dead organisms. The term taphonomy (from the Greek taphos, burial and nomos, law) was introduced during the first half of the twentieth century to describe the study of the transition of the dead remains of organisms from the biosphere to the lithosphere. Archae-ologically related taphonomic studies began much later, near the end of the century (O Connor 2005). 

Some people make physical chemistry sound more confusing than it really is. One of their best tricks is to define it inaccurately, saying it is the physics of chemicals . This definition is sometimes quite good, since it suggests we look at a chemical system and ascertain how it follows the laws of nature. This is true, but it suggests that chemistry is merely a sub-branch of physics and the notoriously mathematical nature of physics impels us to avoid this otherwise useful way of looking at physical chemistry. 

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