Assess the different sources of the law in England and Wales. To what Essay - 8

Assess the different sources of the law in England and Wales. To what extent have external sources affected its development - Essay Example Each of these categories can further be broken down into internal and external sources and they have distinct effects on the development of law. The purpose of this paper is to assess the different sources and further describe to what extent the external ones have affected the development of law. The internal sources include Common law (or Case Law) and Statute law (or the legislation) while external sources are the European Law and the (ECHR), which together form the four principle sources of English law (Adams 2014, p. 19). Founded on the system of precedent, Common law forms the English legal system’s basis whose origin can be traced back to William the Conqueror’s reign in 1066, before which the laws were mainly regional. However, when judges travelled on circuits, they essentially shifted to a national-level judicial system away from localised ones hence creating a unified court system. This required, and continues to, a hierarchical arrangement of the courts and law reporting, meaning inferior courts are bound by decisions made by higher courts. With the Supreme Court at the top, the Court of Appeal follows, then the High Court, which hears civil cases, and the Crown Court that handles criminal cases. The decisions made the judges of the senior appellate courts also become part of law, but, on the other hand, and its decisions are binding to any other courts under its jurisdiction (Giacomo 2011, p. 147). It is worthwhile to mention that such decisions have persuasive implications in the Supreme Court’s other jurisdictions. The decision of the courts are published as law reports, and the significance of the law reports is that they determine the success rate of developing the law in the manner in which they present reliable issues, facts and decisions (CILEX 2014, p. 1). Through the Common law, it is, therefore, possible for courts to make decisions based on earlier ones made under similar circumstances.