Law Opinion Paper
CJA/224
November 8, 2011
Bobby Sheppard

Law Opinion Paper
The United States of America didn’t become the best country in the world from one day to another; our country went under a lot of planning and construction of different ideas. Our countries’ organization is a result of our creation of laws and our criminal system. The creation of laws must have taken many disputes and time to create and up to today we are still working on making it just and adjusting laws to the new era, but our founding fathers made a firm foundation for us to work up from.
Our constitution is the foundation of our criminal laws and other laws; this is the manual from where our countries laws began. The concept of the constitution was picked up from England, and even though England didn’t actually have a printed out constitution, it had its laws of how the government should behave. During the Revolutionary era Americans took that concept and expanded on it, giving the public responsibilities but also put restrictions and obligations on leaders (Cliffsnote.com). The constitution also formed our government and all the obligations and restrictions it has, this is how our democracy was born. The constitution distributes equal power, justice, and responsibility between the three branches of government.
The United States government has three branches of government; the legislative branch, executive branch and the judicial branch. Each branch has a different set of responsibilities, when it comes to law making these three branches are the ones in charge for the process. The legislative branch is the one that enacts a new law. The executive branch is responsible for law enforcement agencies therefore they enforce the new laws made by the legislative branch. The judicial branch is the one that compares new laws to the constitution to make sure that they are good laws. These three branches work together and have equal power; either branch can’t stand on its own because it needs the approval and power of the other two. The dependency of these three branches of government comes from the notion of check and balances, which is a system that the three branches share equal power but cannot work independently. This notion was set by the U.S government to keep order between the branches. Our nation also had great influence by the England government; we based many of our foundations on theirs.
Common law is a body of legal principles and concepts which evolved centuries ago by judges in the English courts. Common law is a result of long evolved social values which are judicially interpreted this is why common law is also refer to as “judge made” laws. Our legal system in America evolved from common law heritage so it was greatly affected, it serve as a foundation for our legal system therefore it had a great affect on it. I believe that common law set a foundation to our legal system and the way we create our laws today reflect highly on common law heritage. As our nation progressed many factors helped our law making evolved, such as events that the court system had to deal with. Events in our past history have also helped us create laws as we progress; our court history has played a big role in law making. An example of court history can be any case in the history of the United States that changed or affected our court system. An example can be the famous Bakke case from 1978, a white male by the name of Allan Bakke had been rejected two years in a row by a medical school that had