7 - Legal Rules, Principles, and Standards

Summary

The common law consists of legal rules, principles, and standards. Common law legal rules are relatively specific legal norms that require actors to act or not act in a specified way, enable or disable specified types of arrangement, or set remedies for specific wrongs. In contrast, legal principles are relatively general legal norms. Because of their generality, legal principles can generate, explain, and justify legal rules, while, because of their specificity, legal rules normally cannot generate, explain, or justify either legal principles or other legal rules. And because of their specificity, most legal rules can determine cases with little or no elaboration. In contrast, most legal principles must be elaborated to determine cases. As used in the common law, the term standard has three different meanings: it may be used as a collective noun that includes all legal norms; it may be used to mean extremely general legal norms; or it may refer to legal rules that are not applicable at the time they are adopted because they are designed to be further elaborated, usually by administrative agencies.