CAMS Level I
Introduction to Business Law and Ethics glossary
Every term this guide defines, A to Z, each with the chapter that teaches it. Open it when a word in a question is unfamiliar, and test yourself on it in the last week: cover the definition and say it in one sentence.
18 terms from the free first chapter
A
- Administrative law
Governs the powers, procedures and accountability of government departments and public bodies, the whole subject of the chapter on administrative law.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
C
- Civil law
Settles disputes between private persons, a contract dispute or a tort claim, remedied through damages or another court order rather than punishment.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
D
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
E
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
J
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
L
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
- Legislation
Acts passed by Parliament and by the county assemblies, the main channel new law actually flows through, produced by the formal legislative process.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
P
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
R
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
S
- Statutory law
Whatever Parliament, or a county assembly, formally enacts, the main channel through which new law actually enters a modern system.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
T
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
- 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.
Taught in Nature and sources of law
The full glossary adds every term from the other 11 chapters, A to Z, each with the chapter that teaches it.