has suggested that the critical values of any legal system include impartiality, neutrality, certainty, equality, openness, flexibility, and growth.
Similarly, if there is an entirely new situation, a return to the policies forming the basic assumptions underpinning potentially relevant rules of law identifies the best guidelines for resolving the immediate dispute.
For this reason, all the main legislatures publish their laws freely whether in hard copy or on the Internet, while others offer them for sale to the public at affordable prices.
In English criminal law, for example, duress is not allowed as a defence to murder because no threat is supposed to overcome a person's moral aversion to taking the life of another.
I can therefore see no justification in logic, morality or law in affording to an attempted murderer the defence which is withheld from a murderer.In refusal of treatment and euthanasia, commission and omission by doctors and hospital authorities resulting in the death of patients has become of increasing significance as societies debate whether the duty to preserve life outweighs the right of the autonomous patient to choose death.
More contentious are those situations in which the patient is unable to make the choice personally, e.g. because in a persistent vegetative state or en ventre sa mere, i.e. a child in the womb.
Similarly, in many branches of law, the doctrine of evasion prevents persons, both natural and artificial, from evading the application of obligations and liabilities already attaching to them.
It also provides that the child's best interest shall be the primary consideration in all actions relating to children, whether taken by public authorities or private institutions.
Thus, public laws which either define the constitution of the state or regulate its powers can only apply within the boundaries agreed as a part of the process of de jure recognition of statehood by the international community.
In conflict cases, no court will apply a "foreign" law if the result of its application would be contrary to public policy.
Thus, courts may have to consider the "justice" implicit in a law that allows a husband to divorce his wife, but not vice versa, as an aspect of sexual discrimination.
When considering questions of status, English courts have held that incapacities imposed on account of slavery (Somersett's Case [1771] 20 St Tr 1), religion (Re Metcalfe's Trusts [1864] 2 De G J & S 122), alien nationality (Re Helbert Wagg & Co Ltd [1956] Ch 323 at pp.