Doctrines

The bodies of legal reasoning this atlas documents, the settled principles and interpretive frameworks a court or a legal system applies rather than a single statute, case, or code. Grouped into six fields, Constitutional and Administrative, Criminal, Civil Procedure, Contract and Property, Tort and Equity, and International and Comparative, the standard fields-of-law doctrinal split used across legal scholarship and law school curricula. A doctrine differs from a landmark case in this atlas: the case is the specific ruling that established or tested a principle, the doctrine is the principle itself, and each is linked to the other by relationship rather than merged into one entity.