Danaan Common Law
The Danaan Common Law forms a major part of the law in the Resurgent Dream. It consists of a large body of non-statutory law reflecting the consensus of centuries of judgments by working jurists.
The Danaan Common Law is all law in the Resurgent Dream which has not been passed by statute. Any Common Law ruling is immediately overruled by any legislative statute which addresses the same issues. Common Law addresses three principle areas.
The largest area of Common Law consists of interpretation and elaboration of statutes. Many statutes passed by Parliament, especially older statutes, consist of tersely worded, general statements which must be applied by jurists. As the fine boundaries and definitions exist only in the Common Law. In order to discover what the law is, one has to locate a precedential decision.
Common Law also covers many areas of criminal law which have never been banned by statute in some Danaan principalities. This is true primarily in the older Danaan principalities where legal proceedings predate the formation of an organized legislature by several centuries. Common Law in these principalities covers many things which have always been crimes, such as murder, rape, theft, and criminal assault. However, this role of the Common Law has been steadily declining ever since the Agwenian Edicts put the country on a constitutional basis. Even in Wintermore, the principality where the Common Law remains strongest, the authority of the Common Law has been reduced enormously by legislative statutes relating to criminal law. A strong movement to fully codify all aspects of the law in a single, comprehensive legal code exists in every principality except Wintermore.
The third area of Common Law regards the law of contracts, excluding employment contracts regulated by a host of labor laws. With the exception of Selinia and Zutern, famous for their exhaustive codes of contract law, no Danaan principality has enacted a statute regarding contract law except to say that a legal contract was a binding agreement entered into freely by two or more parties. Correspondingly, a huge body of Common Law has arisen regarding limitations as to what might be contracted, the precise definition of coercion, the precise boundary of the circumstances in which a person can be considered in his or her right mind, and many other issues of contract law. Yet another body of precedent has arisen nationally around how to handle differences between the Zutern, Selinian, and Common Law systems of contract law, in light of the fact that every principality is required to acknowledge all binding contracts contracted in ever other.
