Statutes

An act of a legislature. The distinguishing feature is not the subject but the procedure: a statute is debated, amended, voted and recorded, it can be repealed by the same process, and it is enforceable in the ordinary courts. The instruments here run from the sixteenth-century act that put an English king at the head of a church to modern acts protecting Native American religious practice and the repatriation of remains, and they show the same machinery being used to establish a religion, to disestablish one, and to make restitution.