Brexit Thread

[Greyblades]

I was going with the idea that the referendum is representative. If you'd say it is not, then I'd argue the UK shouldn't leave based on what only 26% of the population want. You also forgot to subtract the citizens who are too young to vote unless babies can already vote in the UK.

The word "citizen" includes the young, the incapable, even the criminal. You seemed to be giving the impression that 48% of everyone in the country actively didn't want to leave.

Well, tell that to the guy in the video who said law in the UK was/is made from the bottom by the people/courts whereas in continental Europe it's a Napoleonic top-down approach.

I'm at work an lacking headphones so I cannot comment on the video beyond what the auto-generated subtitles tell me, but it sort of is.

What I learned from taking a Law A-level 5 years ago is that in the British common law a court set precedent can change the meaning of a law; where every judge/lawyer from then on says "the last judge on your level facing this sort of circumstance said it was interpreted thus; unless you can say the circumstance is significantly different here you must do the same now" with only a bit of wriggle room to avoid absurdity.

Essentially Common Law allows there to be an automatically growing library of instructions for each situation the law applies to that the original document might not have accounted for.

On the other hand Civil Law based on what was used in Napoleonic France have judges who are free to ignore previous cases and instead have to work off the wording of the original document of law. Civil Law relies less on what the judges who came before decided to do in the same situation, and more how many eventualities the men writing the law thought to account for.

Every time something unexpected comes up the Civil courts ends up having to figure it out themselves and have to keep doing that until the government sets down a new rule, resulting in the law only being changeable from the highest level.

Common law can change from bottom up: a magistrate (the lowest rank of judge; and easiest for the common man to become) can tweak a law's use nation wide unless overruled through appeal in a higher court, whereas in civil law the lower courts cant affect the law outside the immediate case, only the parliament/senate/whatever can do so.

TL:DR Common vs Napoleonic is Flexibility vs Uniformity. Change can be Bottom up rather than Top down in British Law.

Fun fact: Napoleon was on the other side of that dynamic when it came to military practices. His enemies' armies, in particular the Prussians, were hamstrung due to inflexibility in comparison to Napoleon's.
I wonder if he ever appreciated the Irony after the code was developed.