Written laws pile up until someone has to reorganise them
Every legislature eventually faces the same mess. Acts get published in order of passage, starting as a slim shelf and swelling as lawmakers respond to each new crisis. Before long, anyone hunting for the current law must dig through centuries of enactments to work out which parts still apply.
A statute is a formal written law passed by a legislature, whether national, regional or local, and in many systems it is simply called an act. Statutes usually declare, order or forbid something. They differ from judge-made common law, which is unwritten, and from regulations, which executive bodies issue under powers a statute grants them. English used the word by the fourteenth century, borrowing it from Old French terms for a royal proclamation, themselves rooted in a Late Latin word for a decree.
Nearly every country publishes new statutes so anyone can consult them, either in an official gazette alongside other government notices or in dedicated volumes, traditionally arranged by date. That chronological habit is exactly what causes trouble as the pile grows. The usual remedy is codification: gathering existing statutes into topic-based codes, then drafting every new act so it adds, amends, repeals or moves particular sections. In principle the code then always shows the law as it currently stands. Many countries also rank ordinary statutes below their constitution.
The word stretches well beyond parliaments. Treaties founding institutions are often called statutes, as with the European Central Bank, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court's Rome Statute. In Spain, each autonomous community is governed by an autonomy statute, resembling a regional constitution but passed by the national parliament, and ranked as an organic law between the 1978 constitution and ordinary legislation. The name was partly chosen to avoid confusion with the national constitution.
Smaller bodies use the term too. Several British universities call their governing rules statutes, and changing them usually needs the Privy Council's approval, while canon law requires each national conference of Catholic bishops to adopt statutes for its own operation.
Source: Statute
