Parliament means talking, and a majlis is literally a sitting room
Names for lawmaking bodies reveal what people thought they were for. Parliament comes from the Old French for talking, the Arabic majlis means a sitting room, and congress is Latin for having gone together. Iceland's Althing, founded in 930, uses the old Germanic thing, a meeting where matters were discussed.
Other names carry their own histories. Diet goes back to a Greek word covering lifestyle, discussion and decision. Estates comes from an Old French word for condition or state, the Polish Sejm and Rada mean assembly and advice, and Sansad comes from the Sanskrit for assembly. The English husting derives from an Old Norse house meeting, while the Slavic veche meant council or agreement. The Irish Oireachtas preserves a term for a deliberative gathering of freemen.
Formal legislatures reach back at least to the Ecclesia of ancient Athens. In medieval Europe, kings summoned nobles to assemblies that became the ancestors of modern parliaments, and those gatherings also gave legislatures the power of the purse, because monarchs had to consult them before raising taxes. The Althing remains the oldest legislature still in existence.
Political scientists list six main jobs for a democratic legislature: representing people, deliberating, passing laws, authorising spending, forming governments and overseeing the executive. Styles vary sharply. Britain's Parliament is a debating chamber known for lively exchanges on the floor, while the United States Congress does much of its real work in closed committee rooms. Under Westminster rules a cabinet backed by a disciplined majority can pass almost anything it wants, and a parliament can in principle dismiss the government between elections. A congress, elected separately from the president, usually has only impeachment as a way to remove the executive.
Communist states use a third model, the supreme state organ of power, which formally holds all state authority and is bound only by rules it sets for itself. One Chinese legal scholar called the powers of the National People's Congress boundless. The scholar Georg Brunner argued that such constitutions cannot be reconciled with the liberal idea of the rule of law, in which independent courts keep politics within legal limits.
Source: Legislature
