Legal code (municipal)

Usually, the municipality passes a by-law to adopt the code, so the same book applies across that whole territory or Province, etc.. Alternatively, a municipality may elect to issue its own version, such as The City of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, which typically makes its own changes to the British Columbia Building Code (BCBC), and then issues its own Vancouver Building By-law, rather than to simply adopt the BCBC, as all other municipalities in British Columbia do.

The governing body is generally intended to ensure that no one type of stakeholder dominates in order to be able to produce a more balanced and legally defensible final document.

Example legal codes that rely heavily on precedent and the opinions of prior jurists include English common law and U.S.

Napoleonic Code, Chinese law and German law, emphasize very specific philosophical principles rooted in Islam, French, Chinese, and German philosophy respectively – the role of precedent and prior jurists is much reduced and that of current judges enhanced – thus these can be seen as an ethical code which applies to the jurists themselves.

Apart from the foregoing, industry organisations tend to engage in attempts to influence the code writing process through participating in meetings of task committees and groups and providing evidence to make their cases.

To speed cases along and ensure uniform representation, many legal codes require a defendant or plaintiff to be represented by an attorney at law, whose responsibility is to take the client's case without prejudice, and to their best to minimize the penalties applied by law, including ideally the release of their client from any responsibility at all.