ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces legislation: the first of two important generic sources of English legal rules discussed in detail in this book1. This broad heading includes UK statutes, EC legislation (the law of the EU impacting the UK because of our membership of the EU) and the articles of the ECHR (impacting particularly UK law since the HRA 1998). Because of the vast amount of law that is of European origin, most texts, and this one will be no exception, refer to legislation of UK origin as ‘domestic’ to differentiate it from its European dimension
The standard layout of legislation is explained, along with the need to concentrate on English language skills in order to understand the fundamental importance of prepositional words in legislation. The macro-level of a whole statute and its organisation, and the micro-level of the individual elements of legislation (sections, subsections) and their organisation is discussed. The chapter also considers the difficult but fundamental issue of interpreting legislation.
