Question about Acts

alan4cult

When an act gets brought into law does it completely replace the preceding act?

For example does the Road Traffic Act 2010 completely replace all previous Road Traffic Acts?

If not, how can I find out which parts of the older acts are still law? If was to read the Road Traffic Act 1961, many sections would be obsolete and since replaced but how will I know which sections are obsolete?

Is there some sort of consolidated version?

Hope I can get an answer to this.

Thanks.

Reloc8

Any given act will itself state in its contents what it repeals. It gets even messier when you have, as you do, amending legislation which does not carry the same title as the statute which it amends or repeals.

Bloomsbury Professional have recently published the 1961 - 2011 RTA's Annotated by Robert Pierse (about 150 quid to buy I think) and that would be your best source.

Beyond that you would have to undertake the difficult and time consuming task of manually tracking the legislative amendments and additions to the Road Traffic Act 1961.

seamus

An act is usually just an amendment to the original act. Most acts include an interpretation section which will define things like the "Principal Act", which is the original Act, as well as other relevant acts.

The new act then often just contains wording which modifies the original act, such as "Section 6 of the Principal Act is amended to include the following subsection:" or, "The text below is to replace section 56 of the principal act".

Many acts will also contain a "Repeals" section which specifies previous acts (but usually just parts thereof) that are repealed once the new act comes into force.

For example, you can see here that the RTA 1961 repealed the entire RTA of 1933, in essence replacing it:
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1961/en/act/pub/0024/sched1.html#sched1

To the best of my knowledge there are no consolidated acts produced by the government, but they are available to buy. Though someone who's studied law will know more about that.

For someone like me without access to anything but the Statute Book, I'll usually find the Principal Act (in this case the RTA of 1961) and the specific section/law that I'm looking for. Then I use google to locate any reference to that section in later acts, to see if/how it's been modified and what it looks like now.

dermot_sheehan

Some laws are passed for the express purpose of consolidating all the previous statutes in an area, e.g. Taxes Consolidation Act 1997, Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005

Procrastastudy

On the off chance the OP is a first year law student like myself a very nice person when I first got here told me about the consolidated legislation on westlaw.

If you fire up Westlaw you can't miss it. Right at the top of the first page.

ResearchWill

http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/isbc/chrontables.html

A very handy tool click on year of act, then go to Act, then find the section and all amendments are listed.