What is legislature?

Answer 1

A legislature is a type of representative deliberative assembly with the power to create and change laws. The law created by a legislature is called legislation or statutory law. Legislatures are known by many names, the most common being parliament and congress, although these terms also have more specific meanings.

The main job of the legislature is to make and amend laws. In parliamentary systems of government, the legislature is formally supreme and appoints the executive. In presidential systems of government, the legislature is considered a power branch which is equal to and independent of the executive. In addition to enacting laws, legislatures usually have exclusive authority to raise taxes and adopt the budget and other money bills.

The primary components of a legislature are one or more chambers or houses: assemblies that debate and vote upon bills. A legislature with only one house is called unicameral. A bicameral legislature possesses two separate chambers, usually described as an upper house and a lower house, which often differ in duties, powers, and the methods used for the selection of members. Much rarer have been tricameral legislatures; the most recent existed in the waning years of white-minority rule in South Africa.

In most parliamentary systems, the lower house is the more powerful house while the upper house is merely a chamber of advice or review. However, in presidential systems, the powers of the two houses are often similar or equal. In federations, it is typical for the upper house to represent the component states; the same applies to the supranational legislature of the European Union. For this purpose, the upper house may either contain the delegates of state governments, as is the case in the European Union and in Germany and was the case in the United States before 1913, or be elected according to a formula that grants equal representation to states with smaller populations, as is the case in Australia and the modern United States.

Because members of legislatures usually sit together in a specific room to deliberate, seats in that room may be assigned exclusively to members of the legislature. In parliamentary language, the term seat is sometimes used to mean that someone is a member of a legislature. For example, saying that a legislature has 100 "seats" means that there are 100 members of the legislature, and saying that someone is "contesting a seat" means they are trying to get elected as a member of the legislature. By extension, the term seat is often used in less formal contexts to refer to an electoral district itself, as for example in the phrases "safe seat" and "marginal seat".

Answer 2

Legislation (or "statutory law") is law which has been promulgated (or "enacted") by a legislature or other governing body. The term may refer to a single law, or the collective body of enacted law, while "statute" is also used to refer to a single law. Before an item of legislation becomes law it may be known as a bill, which is typically also known as "legislation" while it remains under active consideration. Legislation can have many purposes: to regulate, to authorize, to provide (funds), to sanction, to grant, to declare or to restrict. Beyond recognition of the right to self-determination, the Council's text formulated an array of tailor-made collective rights, such as the right to maintain and develop their distinct political, economic, social and cultural identities and characteristics as well as their legal systems and to participate fully, "if they so choose," in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the State. They were guaranteed the right not to be subjected to genocide or ethnocide, i.e., action aimed at or affecting their integrity as distinct peoples, their cultural values and identities, including the dispossession of land, forced relocation, assimilation or integration, the imposition of foreign lifestyles and Propaganda. The stated rights guaranteed to indigenous peoples as groups, not only as individual persons, include the right to observe, teach and practice tribal spiritual and religious traditions; the right to maintain and protect manifestations of their cultures, archaeological-historical sites and artifacts; the right to restitution of spiritual property taken without their free and informed consent, including the right to repatriate Indian human remains; and the right to protection of sacred places and burial sites. Further listed are the rights to maintain and use tribal languages, to transmit their oral histories and traditions, to education in their language and to control over their own educational systems. They are afforded the right to maintain and develop their political, economic and social systems, and to determine and develop priorities and strategies for exercising their right to development. Their treaties with States should be recognized, observed and enforced. Last, but not least, the Declaration supports the right of indigenous people to own, develop, control, and use the lands and territories which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used, including the right to restitution of lands confiscated, occupied or otherwise taken without their free and informed consent, with the option of providing just and fair compensation wherever such return is not possible. The document, in particular, goes beyond ILO Convention No. 169 in its statements on self-determination, land and resource rights, as well as political autonomy.