WEBVTT

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So here we're looking at the
structure of an Act and we're

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using legislation.gov.uk.

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It's freely available and it has
a very useful table of

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contents that helps you see
all the different sections.

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Now our Acts of Parliament
differ in length.

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Some can be extremely long, like
the Data Protection Act 2018,

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and its sections go into the
hundreds and because of that

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it's divided into parts and then
divided into chapters.

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So we can see here that Part 1
is quite short, so we don't have

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any chapters.

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But when we get to Part 2, it
gets quite long.

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So then it gets further divided
into chapters.

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Now not all Acts are long, some
can be quite short.

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So if we look at the Theft Act
1968, this is a much shorter Act

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and it's not divided into parts
and chapters.

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So some key things with the
structure of Acts.

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The first thing is the
introductory text.

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Now this contains some useful
information.

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It will contain the short title
of the Act which is the Theft

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Act 1968 and it will contain the
long title.

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To the bottom right of the long
title you will find the date of

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Royal Assent, which for this Act
was the 26th of July 1968 and

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that can be really useful when
working out when sections come

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into force.

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The Act also uses titles
for each of the sections which

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helps with navigation.

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So we can see here that Section
1 covers the basic definition of

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"theft", Section 2 "Dishonesty", and
so on.

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How this helps the researcher is
that, if I were say researching

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into burglary, from a quick skim
of the table of contents, I can

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see that Section 9 covers
burglary and Section 10 covers

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aggravated burglary.

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So those would be places I would
want to start when doing my

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research.

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You also have schedules to
enact, and schedules contain

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detail information, and they
also often claim contain repeals

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and revocations and
consequential amendments

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as we can see with this Act
there. This is a brief

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introduction to the structure of
an Act.

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In later recordings, we're going
to look at specific sections.