Statute
formal written document that creates law, including acts, executive orders, and by-laws
A statute is a law or formal written enactment of a legislature. Statutes typically declare, command or prohibit something. Statutes are distinguished from court law and unwritten law (also known as common law) in that they are the expressed will of a legislative body, whether that be on the behalf of a country, state or province, county, municipality, or so on. They are also distinguished from secondary legislation, or regulations, that are issued by an executive body under authority granted by a statute. Depending on the legal system, a statute may also be referred to as an "act".
Etymology
The word appears in use in English as early as the 14th century. "Statute" and earlier English spellings were derived from the Old French words statut, estatut, estatu, meaning "(royal) promulgation, (legal) statute." These terms were in turn derived from the Late Latin statutum, meaning "a law, decree".
Publication and organization
In virtually all countries, newly enacted statutes are published and distributed so that everyone can look up the statutory law. This can be done in the form of a government gazette, which may include other kinds of legal notices released by the government, or in the form of a series of books whose content is limited to legislative acts. In either form, statutes are traditionally published in chronological order based on date of enactment.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Statute” is formal written document that creates law, including acts, executive orders, and by-laws. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Statute, formal and written, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “formal written document that creates law, including acts, executive orders, and by-laws” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q820655.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Statute”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Statute primary sources, Statute archive and Statute research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Statute”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Statute” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.