White collar criminal law is the new branch of law that seeks to cover personal and business behaviors that are tantamount to cheating other individuals or even the nation through very ‘harmless’ means like lying and cheating among others. But lying and cheating have been found to be the bedrock of secret and large-scale embezzlements, business frauds, internet scams, document forgeries and several others. White collar criminal law actually deals with any personal and business behavior that is unethical and in bad taste. But with the rise of the internet and computer users, white collar crimes have risen to stupendous rates. People now commit credit cards frauds, people open and conduct sham business that are meant to scam unwary and greedy individuals into parting with their money for phony gains. People now design sophisticated software that would steal security and financial information for their unethical use, and without leaving the comforts of their rooms, people could commit great frauds and bank large amounts of fraud money from the internet. All these among others constitute white collar crimes and that is what the white collar criminal law is established to deal with.

A white collar criminal law is administered by the FBI and this makes it a federal government business, meaning that anything that constitutes a white collar crime is a crime against the state and would carry maximum punishments as prescribed by these laws. Just like any other laws you could study in the university, white collar law is very wide and entails the use of scientific and technological procedures to carry out and to enforce. The white collar criminal law is made to meet the challenges in the rise of computer and internet crimes and how this has led to credit card frauds, antitrust violations, insurance and claim frauds, internet home job scams and several other types of crimes that looks so little and harmless in the face of the people, and even the perpetrators. The FBI is bringing all its full resources to bear on this crime and the United States government is also bearing all her legal authority to bear on white collar criminal laws as a way to safeguard the citizens and to also punish offenders.

Common Laws

In implementing a system of law to be used for gluing together the social compact of a country and providing some measure of assurance of safety and fair treatment for its citizens, the specific questions which arise in regards to various areas of life must be considered alongside larger issues of the general philosophical approach to be taken in the drafting of such laws. One of the basic philosophical issues related to the creation of laws is that of the relative importance to be granted to the primacy of abstract principles in operating a system of law versus that of the importance of an approach based on applied experience. A system of law based on the concept of the former such approach is referred to as civil law, while one which is based on a system defined along the latter lines is known as a system of common law. Institutions of common laws can be found most prominently as embodied in the legal cultures of practice and principle of the United States and the United Kingdom. Other countries where systems based on common law can be found in effect in many of the nations that at one time were under the sway of the United Kingdom during its tenure of supremacy in administering the British Empire.

The basic technique through which the experiential bias of a system based on common laws is enacted is in the reliance on the decisions of courts and judges for deciding the implementation of laws, which builds up the body of past precedents in legal decisions that are referred to as common law. One of the virtues for this system of common law which is claimed for it by its proponents is that of the ability to react to new kinds of legal issues and areas of concern by affording judges the ability to decide that the past common laws which have been formed through the operation of judicial decision making are not applicable to the new situation and thus form a new precedent which in the future can be relied upon as a cornerstone of common law.

The ways in which the common law system has been formulated in the specific legal cultures of various countries has varied to a wide degree. In the United States, for instance, higher federal courts do not have the ability to form their own regulations as based on common laws, but are given wide latitude in interpreting the Constitution and subsequent legislation passed into being. Prior to 1938, common laws in the United States were implemented somewhat differently, in that courts possessed the power to form new decisions in areas related to state law on which no statutes had yet been formed, thereby affording a plentiful source of common laws, but this power was curbed by the 1938 Supreme Court decision “Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins,” which affected the existence of common laws when it decided that “There is no federal general common law.”

Civil Laws

In the formulation of the system of rules and regulations which is intended to knit a civil society together and guarantee the safety and well-being of its citizens, an essential question to be taken up for consideration for the drafters of such a system is the issue of whether the emphasis and principal methodology of the system of law should consist of an adherence to abstract principle or of a more loosely, flexibly defined system based on the application of decision-making tools to prior experience with cases. In the case of the United States and the United Kingdom, the latter such approach largely holds sway over the conducting of the system of law, which is referred to as common law. Another general type of approach for setting up a legal system is represented by the category referred to as civil law, which falls into the former type of relying on abstract ideals over applied experience as the key to its conception of the functioning of the legal system. The systems which are understood to embrace the definition of civil laws are also related to each other in being commonly descended from the principles of Roman law, and in general have been found as working legal systems in such areas of the world as Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

The concept of civil law was first promulgated during the long tenure enjoyed by the Roman Empire in governing much of the world. It is specifically “descended” from the Code of Justinian, a system of civil laws established by the Emperor of that name. Since that early point in the development of civil law, the ways in which civil laws have been modified have included the modifications made to it by the influence of political and religious institutions during the European Middle Ages, a period of time during which European nations developed their practices and institutions following the long influence of the Roman Empire. Though the actual substance of civil laws was often not a decisive influence on the implementation of legal practices in various areas of the empire, in which administrators tended to accede to local customs and rules in the larger interest of maintaining a sense of peace and civil order, the basic concept of civil law as implementing the existence of a defined body of civil laws tended to exercise an effect on countries which had at one point been tied to an informal system of culturally defined practices. Later widespread promulgations of a more advanced form of civil law often came about through similar methods based in the development of state power and of its imposition on other cultures, as can be seen in the case of a prominent source for civil laws, that of the Napoleonic Code, which distributed its system of civil laws through the European continent through the military campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte, and later of the ascension of Germany as a unified nation state and imperial power during the era of colonialist conquest.

Gun Laws

The gun laws which exist in the United States are notable for the controversy which has attended their creation and enforcement, and the complexity which has arisen in the system due to the latitude granted to states in the enforcement of law. The basic foundation for the existence of gun laws within the United States is formed by the existence of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which grants wide rights in regard to the exercise of gun ownership within the United States and links such rights to the maintenance of a secure citizenry and a functioning civil society, as had been seen in the recent gain of independence through armed action against the forces of the King of England.

The basis for the dispute over the passage of gun control laws, which have often aroused wide based opposition from the advocates of gun ownership rights, has been placed in the evolution of the United States from a primarily rural society to one largely based in its economic and social activities on urban and industrial modes of living, in which the ownership of firearms among people placed together in tightly cramped quarters can have different effects than it does in rural communities of homesteads often separated by distance. Arguments both for and against gun control laws have been based on this kind of lifestyle, with proponents for gun control laws often arguing that the wide availability of firearms or in some arguments the availability of firearms introduces a destabilizing and violent element into urban society, while arguments in favor of widely or totally permissive gun laws often base their approaches on the same basis of social observation by concluding that the violent, destabilizing element of social chaos is already present and inherent in American urban life and requires the passage of gun laws granting wide rights for firearm possession in order to provide a sufficient measure of safety for citizens.

In implementing the requirements of the Second Constitutional Amendment for the practical purposes of enforcing some variety of gun control laws in the United States, debate has often turned on two basic questions. One exists in regard to the context of the historical basis of gun laws as they existed in the epoch of America in which well-armed militias were considered essential aspects of the enforcement of law. This question concerns the extent to which the political and social considerations which gave rise to the conception of the Second Amendment can be plausibly said to exist in contemporary America, when then leads to a broader legal question, beyond the specific issue of gun laws, of the degree to which considerations are even applicable to the implementation of the Constitution, which some legal scholars and activists believe holds a sacrosanct place as a guarantee of political stability in the United States. Another issue exists in regard to the question of whether the Second Amendment is meant to specifically address militia gun ownership, potentially leaving some other gun control laws wide open.