Introduction to Business Law and Ethics cheat sheet

Key terms

Law

The rules a state makes or recognises to govern how people within its society must behave, backed by the courts' power to actually enforce them.

The jurisdiction of the state

The reach of a state's own courts and institutions to make and enforce law, normally its own territory and its own citizens wherever in the world they happen to be.

Enforcement

The state making people actually comply, through its courts, its police, and the rest of its machinery, exactly what separates a legal rule from one that is only moral or social.

Administrative law

Governs the powers, procedures and accountability of government departments and public bodies, the whole subject of the chapter on administrative law.

Revenue law

Governs how taxes and duties are assessed and collected, the Income Tax Act and the Value Added Tax Act being the obvious examples.

Criminal law

Treats conduct as an offence against the state itself, and provides for its punishment, prosecuted in the Republic's own name rather than by the victim personally.

Civil law

Settles disputes between private persons, a contract dispute or a tort claim, remedied through damages or another court order rather than punishment.

Common law

Built up by judges through the cases they actually decide rather than legislated by Parliament, inherited from England and reshaped through Kenya's own precedent since.

Statutory law

Whatever Parliament, or a county assembly, formally enacts, the main channel through which new law actually enters a modern system.

Constitutional law

The rules, found chiefly in the Constitution of Kenya 2010 itself, that set up the organs of government, share power between them, and guarantee fundamental rights.

Private and public law

Private law governs relationships between individuals, contract, tort, property among them; public law governs the state's own relationship with individuals and between its own organs, constitutional and administrative law belonging here.

The Constitution of Kenya 2010

Kenya's supreme law under Article 2, any other law that conflicts with it is void to that extent, and it binds every single person in the country.

Legislation

Acts passed by Parliament and by the county assemblies, the main channel new law actually flows through, produced by the formal legislative process.

Delegated legislation

Rules, regulations and orders a body (a Cabinet Secretary, most often) makes under power an Act of Parliament has already handed it, letting detailed or technical rules be set without Parliament having to pass a fresh Act every time.

Common law and doctrines of equity

Two strands of English judge-made law received into the Kenyan system to the extent local circumstances allow: common law from the ordinary courts, and equity, developed specifically to soften common law's own rigidity.

African customary law

A community's own customs, applied chiefly to personal status, marriage, divorce and succession among those subject to it, provided it is not repugnant to justice and morality and does not conflict with any written law.

Religious laws: Islamic law and Hindu law

Personal-law systems that apply to adherents of a given faith in defined matters, Islamic law's presence in the Kadhis' Courts over Muslim personal status being the most visible example.

Judicial precedent

Stare decisis in practice: a higher court's ruling on a point of law binds a lower court deciding a later case on materially similar facts, the mechanism that keeps the law consistent and predictable over time.