Statutory law or statute law is written law passed by a body of legislature. This is as opposed to customary law. Statutes may originate with national, state legislatures or local municipalities; the term codified. The entire body of codified statute is referred to as a "code," such as the United States Code, the Ohio Revised Code or the Code of Canon Law; the substantive provisions of the Act could be codified in one or more titles of the United States Code while the provisions of the law that have not reached their "effective date" would be available by reference to the United States Statutes at Large. Another meaning of "codified law" is a statute that takes the common law in a certain area of the law and puts it in statute or code form. Another example of statutes that are not codified is a "private law" that may originate as a private bill, a law affecting only one person or a small group of persons. An example was divorce in Canada prior to the passage of the Divorce Act of 1968. If unavailable by administrative or judicial means, it was possible to obtain a legislative divorce by application to the Senate of Canada, which reviewed and investigated petitions for divorce, which would be voted upon by the Senate and subsequently made into law.

In the United Kingdom Parliament, private bills were used in the nineteenth century to create corporations, grant monopolies and give individuals attention to be more considered by the parliament. The government may seek to have a bill introduced unofficially by a backbencher so as not to create a public scandal. Sometimes a private member's bill may have private bill aspects, in such case the proposed legislation is called a hybrid bill. Legislation Legislative intent Plain meaning rule Statutory interpretation Strict constructionism Textualism Parliamentary Fact Sheets United Kingdom

Gabriel Montalvo Higuera was a Colombian prelate of the Catholic Church who worked in the diplomatic service of the Holy See for fifty years, with the title of archbishop and the rank of nuncio from 1974. His assignments included terms as nuncio in Central America, northern Africa and the United States. Gabriel Montalvo Higuera was born 27 January 1930, in Colombia, his father was at one time Colombian ambassador to the Holy See. Montalvo was ordained a priest on 18 January 1953. In preparation for a diplomat's career, he completed the course of study at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in 1954, he served at various papal embassies in Bolivia, Argentina and El Salvador before being assigned to the Vatican's Secretariat of State to work on Eastern-bloc relations. On 14 June 1974, he was appointed titular archbishop of Celene and Apostolic Nuncio to Honduras and Nicaragua, he was consecrated a bishop on 30 June 1974 by Pope Paul VI. The following December, after Sandanista rebels kidnapped a number of hostages, Montalvo was one of those who accompanied the kidnappers' flight to Havana in order to insure their safety.

On 18 March 1980, Pope John Paul II appointed him Apostolic Pro-Nuncio to Algeria and Tunisia and Apostolic Delegate to Libya. He was recalled to Rome in 1982 to assist with the Vatican's successful arbitration of the dispute between Chile and Argentina over the Beagle Channel. On 12 June 1986, he was appointed Apostolic Pro-Nuncio to Yugoslavia. On 17 April 1993, he was given additional responsibility as Apostolic Nuncio to Belarus. Just two weeks on 29 April 1993, he was named President of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, a post he held until 1998 while continuing in Belarus until 1994 and in Yugoslavia until 1996. Pope John Paul appointed him Apostolic Nuncio to the United States on 7 December 1998, he was Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the Organization of American States the same day. In 2000 Montalvo promptly forwarded to the Secretariat a letter that reported rumors of inappropriate behavior with seminarians on the part of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick; when the letter's author had hesitated to put his charges in writing, fearful that he would suffer reprisals if McCarrick saw it, Montalvo insisted he write saying "What do you think we are, fools?

Send the letter." On 6 December 2005, Paul Bootkoski Bishop of Metuchen, New Jersey, informed Montalvo of three complaints regarding inappropriate sexual behavior by McCarrick, first by phone, in writing. Two were made by former priests. On 17 December 2005, Montalvo retired as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, at the mandatory age of seventy-five. Despite his long tenure as nuncio, he was a little-known public figure in the United States, where he shunned media attention. On 2 August 2006, he died in Rome of lung cancer, a disease from which he had been suffering since before his retirement

Rollin Douglas Hotchkiss was an American biochemist who helped to establish the role of DNA as the genetic material and contributed to the isolation and purification of the first antibiotics. His work on bacterial transformation helped lay the groundwork for the field of molecular genetics. Hotchkiss was born in Connecticut; the son of factory workers, he attended Yale University after scoring the highest in the nation on an achievement test. Hotchkiss earned a B. S. in chemistry in 1932, remained at Yale for a Ph. D. in organic chemistry. After completing his doctoral work in 1935, Hotchkiss became a fellow of the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research, where he would remain until retirement in 1982. At the Rockefeller Institute, Hotchkiss worked as an assistant to Oswald Avery and Walter Goebel, was encouraged to learn more biology at a summer courses at the Marine Biological Laboratory, his early work isolating and synthesizing derivatives of glucoronic acid led to the identification of one of the specific polysaccharides in the capsule of type III pneumococci.

Hotchkiss spent the 1937-1938 academic year in the lab of Heinz Holter and Kaj Linderstrøm-Lang at Carlsberg Laboratory learning protein analysis techniques. In 1938, he began collaborating with René Dubos to isolate and study antibiotics produced by soil bacteria, their work on gramicidin and tyrocidine led to the first commercial antibiotics, with Fritz Lipmann they found that the antibiotics include D-amino acids. During the late 1930s, Hotchkiss was strongly critical of the Bergann–Niemann hypothesis of protein structure, the proposal by fellow Rockefeller biochemists Max Bergmann and Carl Niemann that protein structures always consist of multiples of 288 amino acids.. In 1946, in the wake of the Avery–MacLeod–McCarty experiment showing that DNA, not protein, had the power to transform bacteria from one type to another, Hotchkiss rejoined Avery's lab, his work on protein analysis helped answer Avery's critics who argued that the experiment was not sufficiently rigorous to rule out protein contamination.

Hotchkiss found that all the detected nitrogen in the purified DNA used in for the transformation experiments came from glycine, a breakdown product of the nucleotide base adenine, estimated that undetected protein contamination was at most.02%, although he did not publish this result until 1952. In 1948 Hotchkiss used paper chromatography to quantify the base composition of DNA and, independently of Erwin Chargaff, found that the base ratios differed from species to species. In 1951, Hotchkiss showed that purified bacterial DNA could be used to transfer penicillin resistance from one strain of bacteria to another without changing the capsule type, his subsequent worked helped establish the basics of bacterial genetics, showing that many features of classical genetics have parallels in bacteria, despite their lack of chromosomes. Hotchkiss continued working in molecular genetics until his retirement in 1982, including significant collaborations with Julius Marmur, Maurice Fox, Alexander Tomasz, Joan Kent, Sanford Lacks, Elena Ottolenghi, his wife Magda Gabor-Hotchkiss.

In the mid-1960s, Hotchkiss became interested in the potential dangers of genetic engineering. Through the early 1970s he articulated many of the concerns that led to the 1975 Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA. Hotchkiss was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, served as president of the Genetics Society of America from 1971 to 1972. After leaving Rockefeller University in 1982, he worked as a research professor at the University at Albany, SUNY until retiring to Lenox, Massachusetts in 1986. Hotchkiss died December 2004 of congestive heart failure. National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir