Statute

King Hammurabi of Babylon issued 282 laws carved on a diorite stele, found by archaeologists at Susa in 1901 and now displayed in ...

Roman plebeians demanded law be written down so magistrates could not rule by whim, and a commission produced twelve bronze tablet...

Justinian directed his jurists to gather and purify a millennium of Roman law into the Code, the Digest, the Institutes, and later...

Sealed by King John at Runnymede in June 1215 after his barons forced the issue, Magna Carta bound the king to sixty three concess...

Parliament passed the Habeas Corpus Act to stop courts and jailers evading the ancient writ through procedural games, imposing str...

Drafted after William and Mary accepted the crown, the Bill of Rights of 1689 declared the illegality of royal suspension of laws,...

Parliament forced Charles I to accept the Petition of Right in exchange for funds, restating that no taxation without common conse...

The Act of Supremacy declared Henry VIII supreme head of the Church of England, severing obedience to Rome after the Pope refused ...

The Judicature Acts merged the historically separate courts of common law and Chancery into a single Supreme Court of Judicature, ...

The Human Rights Act made Convention rights enforceable in British courts without a trip to Strasbourg, requiring legislation to b...

The Constitutional Reform Act of 2005 severed the apex of the judiciary from the House of Lords, creating a United Kingdom Supreme...

Drafted in Philadelphia in 1787 and ratified by the states, the Constitution creates three branches with checks and balances, divi...

Promised during ratification to quiet anti federalist fears, the first ten amendments protect speech, press, religion, arms, secur...

Ratified in December 1865 as the Civil War ended, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as ...

The Fourteenth Amendment defined national citizenship over the Dred Scott denial, bound states to due process and equal protection...

The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited denying the vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, completing the ...

After a seventy two year campaign from Seneca Falls onward, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in August 1920 when Tennessee be...

The Sherman Act outlawed contracts in restraint of trade and monopolization, criminalizing conduct that had alarmed the populist e...

Signed by Franklin Roosevelt in August 1935, the act created old age insurance funded by payroll contributions, unemployment insur...

Proposed by President Kennedy after Birmingham and passed under President Johnson after the longest filibuster in Senate history, ...

Passed after the Selma marches, the act suspended literacy tests and stationed federal examiners, but its core was the preclearanc...

FOIA establishes the presumption that the public may see agency records, subject to nine exemptions covering national security, pr...

The APA laid down the modern administrative constitution, requiring notice and comment rulemaking, formal adjudication with hearin...

Passed six weeks after the September 11 attacks with near unanimous margins, the PATRIOT Act eased intelligence sharing, broadened...

The 1934 act created the Securities and Exchange Commission, extended disclosure beyond the initial offerings regulated by the 193...

Napoleon's commission distilled revolutionary ideals, equality before the law, property, secular civil status, and contract freedo...

Drafted over two decades by pandectist scholars, the BGB took effect in 1900 as an abstract, five book architecture from general r...

The four Geneva Conventions of 1949 protect the wounded and sick on land and at sea, prisoners of war, and civilians under occupat...

Adopted in Rome in 1998 by 120 states and in force in 2002, the statute created the first permanent international criminal court w...

Signed in San Francisco in June 1945, the Charter prohibits the use of force except in self defense or with Security Council autho...

The treaties of Osnabruck and Munster ended three decades of confessional war in 1648, recognizing territorial sovereignty and the...

The General Data Protection Regulation, adopted in 2016 and enforceable from May 2018, governs all processing of personal data in ...

Drafted in the early Council of Europe and opened in Rome in 1950, the convention guarantees rights from life and fair trial to ex...

The Paris Agreement, adopted by nearly two hundred parties in December 2015, aims to hold warming well below two degrees while pur...

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, concluded in 1982 after nine years of negotiation, sets territorial seas at twelve miles,...

The Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907 codified means and methods of warfare, from permissible weapons to treatment of surrenderin...

Issued in the name of Ur-Nammu, founder of the Third Dynasty of Ur, or possibly his son Shulgi, the code predates Hammurabi's by r...

Before Draco, Athenian law was oral and interpreted by aristocratic magistrates, a source of resentment that writing the law down ...

Passed by Earl Grey's Whig government after two years of crisis, riots, and repeated rejection by the House of Lords, the act abol...

When the Lords rejected David Lloyd George's People's Budget in 1909, breaking a long convention against interfering with finance,...

Following the Balfour Declaration of 1926, which described Britain and the dominions as equal in status, the Statute of Westminste...

Signed by President George H. W. Bush in July 1990 after years of activism that included the Capitol Crawl, in which disabled prot...

Ratified with the rest of the Bill of Rights in 1791, the First Amendment bars Congress from establishing religion or prohibiting ...

The Fourth Amendment grew out of colonial anger at general warrants and writs of assistance that let British officials search home...

Adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 9, 1948 and in force from 1951, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of ...

Drafted by the International Law Commission and concluded in Vienna in 1969, the convention entered into force in 1980 and sets ou...

Drafted largely by the jurist Eugen Huber and adopted in 1907, the Swiss Civil Code took effect in 1912 together with a revised Co...