Procedural law

Procedural law or adjective law comprises the rules by which a court hears and determines what happens in civil lawsuit, criminal or administrative proceedings. The rules are designed to ensure a fair and consistent application of due process (in the U.S.) or fundamental justice (in other common law countries) to all cases that come before a court.

Substantive law, which refers to the actual claims and defenses whose validity is tested through the procedures of procedural law, is different from procedural law.

In context of procedural law; procedural rights may also refer not exhaustively to rights to Information, rights to justice, rights to participation which those rights encompassing, general Civil and Political rights. In environmental law, these procedural Rights have been reflected within the UNECE Convention on "Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters" known as the Aarhus Convention (1998).

Legal procedure

Procedure (term)

A Procedure is a document written to support a "Policy Directive". A Procedure is designed to describe Who, What, Where, When, and Why by means of establishing corporate accountability in support of the implementation of a "policy".

The "How" is further documented by each organizational unit in the form of "Work Instructions" which aims to further support a procedure by providing greater detail.

Example procedure

As an example, suppose that a manufacturing facility established a policy that all overtime shall be approved. A procedure can be created to establish “Who” can approve overtime (ranks, roles & responsibilities), "What" forms/systems need to be used, "Where" they are located, "When" overtime is applicable. And the "Why" refers to the management directive established via a "Policy". The output of a procedures become input into a work instruction which is a set of actions or operations which have to be executed in the same manner in order to achieve intended results under the same circumstances.(for example, in the latter example, the "what" [output of procedure] could be further broken down into a work instruction to describe "how" a manager/employee access the systems for approving/reviewing overtime, i.e. click on this hyperlink, on this button, and choose these fields, and click approve/reject.