It is sometimes used, loosely, to mean abrogation, as in the legal maxim lex posterior derogat priori ("a subsequent law derogates the previous one").
[7] In the conflict between English common law and ecclesiastical courts, both existed as legal systems of equal validity in one geographic space.
By the mid 14th century the English Parliament had attempted to limit ecclesiastical jurisdiction with the Statute of Praemunire.
[8][9] After the Reformation, appealing to the Roman (or "spiritual") jurisdiction was considered punishable as an offence in derogation of the king's authority.
After the American Civil War legislation started to become more important, and some people saw common law as a way of expanding and discovering new rights under the Due Process Clause jurisprudence.
Others thought that legislative statutes that changed common law ought to be narrowly interpreted without expansion, as the derogation canon suggested.
One such example is the Convention Against Torture, of which Article 2(2) states:[14] No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.A UK law permitting warrantless arrest and detention of suspected terrorists was found to violate protected rights according to Brogan v. The United Kingdom, an ECHR decision in which the court reviewed the arrest in Northern Ireland of four persons under a 1984 British law that created a special powers derogation from the established proscription against warrantless arrests.
A non-canon-law analogue of dispensation might be the issuing of a zoning variance to a particular business, while a general rezoning applied to all properties in an area is more analogous to derogation.