- What is a legal system?
- Characteristics of the legal system
- Structure of the legal system
- Importance of the legal system
- Legal loopholes
- Legal antinomies
We explain what a legal system is, its structure, importance and other characteristics. In addition, legal loopholes.
What is a legal system?
The legal system is the set systematic of laws Y rules that legally make up a Condition. That is to say, the total number of norms with which a State or a nation are governed at a given moment of the history, will be your legal system. In the case of modern States, it corresponds to the Constitution or Magna Carta.
The legal system not only includes the “new” norms with which a society chooses to be governed, but also the traditional set of rules that make up his way of understanding the Justice. For that reason, there are two different ways of understanding it and of thinking about its origin, which are:
- The normative current. Anchor in the natural law or natural law, states that every legal system is sustained on the basis of a series of judgments of value, beliefs and convictions that would be somehow inherent to the human being.
- The institutional current. He prefers to think together with iuspositivism that the legal system is formed by society itself, by its mechanisms for guaranteeing the legality and the institutionality, as well as its application criteria, the result of a consensus within society itself.
We must not confuse the legal system with the legal order, which would become the set of rules within the legal system to govern a specific area of society.
Characteristics of the legal system
Every legal system is concrete and organic. It consists not only of a body of norms, but also of those necessary for their modification, elaboration, developing, application and evaluation.
Its regulations are all state, that is, they are dictated from the institutions to which the National Constitution grants regulatory or sanctioning powers. They have a formal unit, that is, their production obeys similar patterns of reasoning.
Structure of the legal system
Every legal system is structured based on a hierarchical criterion in the laws. In this way, a system of predominance is built among those of the widest range over the most local or specific.
This hierarchy is understood from the call Kelsen pyramid, a form of graphic representation that organizes the different types of laws and regulations of the legal system.
At the top are the laws constitutional and the international treaties signed by the countries, and at the base the local or parochial laws and institutions, going through various steps. Each legal system establishes its own Kelsen Pyramid.
Importance of the legal system
The legal system is fundamental for the construction of a society in peace, with rule of law, capable of governing herself through a structured and coherent set of rules.
Prevent the laws from contradicting each other, taking precedence or there are situations that are impossible to judge. Without a firm hierarchy and an organic legal system, the law of the strongest and other forms of imposition that would result in violence Social.
Legal loopholes
It is known as a legal loophole, legal vacuum or legal limbo to specific matters that lack legislation in a given legal system.
It is a situation of legal vacuum, since there is no sanctioned norm that allows us to know what to do or how to face it. Therefore, it requires judges and jurists to choose a substitute norm, that is, to choose a law that regulates a similar matter or that can in some way also be applied.
Legal antinomies
Similarly, the contradictions between the norms of the same legal system are called legal antinomies, that is, the case in which two or more norms apply to the same case indicating behaviors or different or even contradictory resolutions.
Said antinomy can be total (when a choice must be made between one of the two norms to apply) or partial (when the matter that a norm deals with is also included in that of a different one in another sense). A coherent and well-designed legal order, first of all, should be completely devoid of legal antinomies.