Statutory means legally punishable??

Ther example that leaps to mind is **statutory rape**. This refers (usually) to someone having sex with a minor. Normally **rape** refers to forcing someone to have sex; sex without consent. But if a 40 year old man has sex with a 12 year old girl, this is considered rape even if she consented. This is rape because there is a law—a statute—prohibiting it.

There are two types of law: case law like what the Supreme Court has ruled in a written ruling , and statutory law where laws have been collected and written into a list of laws called Codes or Statutes.(edit: this refers to the USA)

Statutory just means according to law. You can have a statutory duty for example. If you go \*against\* the statute, \*then\* there may be legally punishable consequences, but 'statutory' does not in itself imply punishment.

The most common usage that I've seen is in the phrase "statutory rape". This is most commonly used to refer to a situation where an adult has sex with a minor (someone younger than the age of consent). Because the minor is below the age of consent, they are considered by the law to be unable to consent to sex. Therefore any sex would be rape, so it is statutory rape. For instance, without the exceptions many states in the US write into their rape laws, someone who is 18 having sex with their girlfriend/boyfriend who happens to still be 17 could be statutory rape, even if no one was forced to do anything they didn't want to do. States carve out these exceptions, because lawmakers generally understand that situations like that happen regularly, but aren't harmful in the same way as, say, a teacher coercing a student into a sexual situation.

I think it's most commonly used in "statutory rape," which is when you have sex with someone underage. Obviously rape is always illegal, but you can't always prove that sex qualified as rape. With statutory rape, however, sex with someone underage is always considered rape. Except for lawyers and judges etc, I'd imagine this is the ONLY way most people use it.

A statute is a codified law. A criminal offense defined by a statute is punishable by law. The “law” in this case is specifically the statute. Statutory doesn’t necessarily mean *punishable,* just established by statute. For example, the *statutory voing age* is the minimum age you need to be to vote, there’s no punishment necessarily implied. Outside of a technical legal context, where the precise source of a law matters (based on a statute, or a judicial opinion, or a constitutional provision, etc.) you can probably almost always use legal and statutory interchangeably.

No. Statutory does not necessarily mean "punishable". For example, if you form a company in the United States, you have a statutory duty to file annual paperwork. If you dont file this annual paperwork, the company becomes legally dormant, but there is no punishment of the individual who was obliged to file the paperwork On the other hand, if you earn money in the United States, you have a statutory duty to file a tax return. If you dont file the annual tax return, you ARE punished. The difference is the two statutes. The corporate statute does not provide for punishment. But the income statute states that failure to file a tax return will result in imprisonment. Both duties under the statutes are "statutory obligations." But the violation of one statutory obligation goes unpunished, while the failure of the second statutory obligation is severely punished. It depends not on the word "statutory", but rather upon what was written into the statute in the first place.

I’m a lawyer. I regularly use the word ‘statutory’ to distinguish from other sources of law, like a constitution, regulation, or judicial decision. There are offenses which are regulatory/administrative (created by administrative rules) and those offenses are not statutory. Most American law is passed by the states, and each state has its own law. In some states, I think there are still common-law offenses, created by judicial decisions, but I’m not sure how many states still do that. There are no common-law offenses in my state. But, if they exist, they are not statutory. ‘Statutory rape’ refers specifically to rape of a minor who consents factually but is unable consent legally. I’d call that an idiom, because in my jurisdiction (and in most of the US, maybe all) violent rape is also criminalized by a statute, but no one would describe a violent rape as ‘statutory rape.’ I don’t really agree that ‘statutory’ means ‘legally punishable,’ but it might be useful to describe an offense or a wrong as ‘statutory’ to convey that you are saying that something is against the law in a technical or literal sense, rather than metaphorically.

If you start diving into the products of legislation be prepared to be occasionally baffled. The law is its own language. That’s one of the things that law school teaches. 

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Yes.. what else did you think it meant? I am not aware of any other meaning of 'statutory'.

A statute is a piece of written law, so in commonwealth nations it'd be a part of an act of parliment, in the US a act of congress. so there's a act, i.e. 'The Residential Tenancy Act 1997 (Vic)' that act has statutes, which then have sections and so on.

I’ve only seen it used in that sense. 

Statute means a law where you’ve highlighted it.