what id the difference...

[excelsior-1]

between unlawful and illegal? <br/> anybody?

[excelsior-1]

sorry. title should be what IS the difference

[tenrec]

illegal is a sick bird?

[tenrec]

Joke!

[excelsior-1]

well done tenrec

[tenrec]

OMG, was this really a joke? I thought you were serious and had just posted in wrong place, sorry!

[JonnyBoy12]

I did not know that this was a joke either!

[missprim]

I didn't realise it was a joke.

[excelsior-1]

well i did post it in the joke section. and, as somebody jumped all over me the other day for posting a joke in the chatterbox section, i thought i'd better get it right

[tenrec]

You should be so lucky having someone "jump all over you"!

[missprim]

But it's not really a joke, it's more of a riddle.
Why are you using italics? I can hardly read what you are writing.

[FredPuli43]

None. But 'unlawful' and 'unlawfully' appear in the text of statutes, Acts of Parliament. 'Illegal' and 'illegally' rarely, if ever, do: "Whosoever shall unlawfully and maliciously..." and not "Whosoever shall illegally...". There's no clear reason for this practice. An act which contravenes the statute is an illegal act which the relevant section in the statute may have defined with the word 'unlawful' : "It shall be unlawful for any person to..." ! Either way, it's illegal or unlawful.

A difference could be conjured up, that an illegal act is one that contravenes a statute, a law, and an unlawful one is one that contravenes common law, the law made by judges over the centuries and not made into a statute, but that would be mere ingenuity . We would say that murder was always ' illegal' even though there wasn't a statute saying so and, indeed, anything other than the traditional definition of it, judge made, which was only slightly amended by statute in recent years.

[Jemisa]

I give up...

jem

[FredPuli43]

Well, we all know the joke, jem.