Common law - sustany/dvg GitHub Wiki

Common law is law that is derived from judicial decisions instead of from statutes. American courts originally fashioned common law rules based on�English common law until the American legal system was sufficiently mature to create common law rules either from direct precedent or by analogy to comparable areas of decided law.� In the 2019 Supreme Court case of Gamble v. United States, Justice Thomas issued a concurring opinion discussing common law and, in particular, the role of stare decises�in a common law system.� �Though most common law is found at the state level, there is a limited body of federal common law--that is, rules created and applied by federal courts absent any controlling federal statute.� In the 2020 Supreme Court opinion�Rodriguez v. FDIC, a unanimous Court quoted an earlier decision to explain that federal "common lawmaking must be 'necessary to protect uniquely federal interests'" in striking down a federal common law rule addressing the distribution of corporate tax refunds.��

At the state level, legislatures often subsequently codify�common law rules from the courts of their state, either to give the rule the permanence afforded by a statute, to modify it somehow (by either expanding or restricting the scope of the common law rule, for example) or to replace the outcome entirely with legislation.� An example that gained national attention was the 2018 California Supreme Court decision in�Dynamex�Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court, which articulated a three-part test for determining whether California workers were independent contractors or employees for purposes of California labor law.� The California Legislature responded by creating a new section of the Labor Code, 2750.3, which codified and expanded on the�Dynamexholding and went into effect on January 1, 2020.� (Note that, like many statutes responding to a common law rule, California Labor Code Section 2750.3 specifically mentions the�Dynamexholding.)��

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Last updated in May of�2020 by the Wex Definitions Team