Fedizen @PublicChaffinch - a “masto certified hot wife” - posted:

my husband is trying to think of “all the different laws you get”. so far he has offered martial law and jude law

Now, this is a good start.

Here are my (admittedly far less amusing than I had originally intended) thoughts.

Aside: what constitutes an area of law is often debatable - see, for example, the “is cyberlaw ’law of the horse’?” debates from the mid-1990s.

Law I studied as an undergrad

• Contract law
• Criminal law
• Constitutional / administrative law
• Realty law / law of real property (as distinct from personalty law, the law of personal property, or the law of intellectual property)
• Tort law / law of obligations
• EU law
• Law of trusts / equity
• IT law
• Family law
• Revenue / tax law

Law I studied on my practitioner course

• Commercial law
• Media law
• Corporate law (a mix of business administration law and, for god knows why, equity finance law)
• Intellectual property law (which isn’t really one law, but the law of lots of different things, all bundled together - copyright, design rights, patents, registered trade marks etc)

Law I studied for my master’s degree

• Data protection law
• Privacy law
• Other human rights law (e.g. right to freedom of expression)
• Telecoms law
• Internet law
• Intermediary liability law (perhaps a subset of Internet law? I think “Internet law” deserves breaking down these days…)
• and some other bits already mentioned above

Law I studied for my PhD

• Not enough of anything

Law I practise now

• Surveillance law
• Data protection law
• Privacy law
• Human rights law
• Telecoms law
• Internet law
• Intermediary liability law
• Contract law
• Tort law
• Constitutional / administrative law
• Cybersecurity law
• Commercial law
• Copyright law (most commonly around software / Free / open source licensing)
• Personalty law
• Consumer rights law
• and probably more

And loads of law I didn’t study / don’t practise

• Environment law
• Maritime law
• Personal injury law
• Planning law
• Admiralty law (often cited by those claiming to be “sovereign citizens” or “freemen on the land”, variations of the same legal fiction, which comes up with worrying frequency in my work)
• Immigration law
• Finance law
• Company law
• Carriage of goods by sea law
• Child custody law (a subset of family law?)
• Aviation law
• Travel law
• and, I am sure, many more

Laws in the sense of legal systems

• Civil law
• Common law
• Law of the jungle

Laws which do not apply in Australia

• The laws of mathematics

Laws which aren’t worth thinking about further

• Law of diminishing returns

Laws which didn’t work out the way they were intended to work out

• Law of unintended consequences

Laws of physics

• Newton’s
• Boyle’s
• Gravity
• Thermodynamics
• etc

Tastiest law

• Coles law

Don’t mention Nazis

• Godwin’s law

Processing power law

• Moore’s law

Laws which went wrong (because of course they did)

• Murphy’s Law (with thanks to Jem)

Other famous laws

• Jude Law
• Lord Justice (John) Laws

Julian and Sandy’s law

• Bona Law (with thanks to Dan Hedley)

Positional laws

• Out laws
• In laws (with thanks to Ben Tasker)

Best written law

• s27 Merchant Shipping Act 1995 (read it, and don’t forget to tip the drafters!)