What Is Law?
Law is the system of rules that a country or community recognises as regulating people’s actions. Its main purpose is to protect people and their property. It also helps people to live together peacefully and fairly by setting limits on what they can and cannot do. Law is usually enforced by police or courts.
There are many different types of laws, depending on the subject they cover. For example, some laws are about money, such as tax law or banking law, and other laws are about health and safety. There are also many laws about families, such as inheritance law or marriage law.
The law is a complicated thing because it is not always easy to understand what a particular rule or law actually means. For instance, there is a difference between English law and American law, even though both are considered to be part of the English legal system. The English law is more formal and the language is stricter, but American law has more flexibility and freedom for people to choose their own rules.
Most countries have a constitution that sets out the overall framework of their laws, and further laws called statutes or regulations set out details about particular subjects. These are normally made by groups of politicians in a legislature, such as a parliament or congress, which is elected (chosen) by the governed peoples. Laws may also be made by judges in a court, which is a common form of law-making. Judges’ decisions are binding on other courts in their jurisdiction, but the decisions of lower courts do not have such authority.
Generally, laws evolve over time. This is because the courts will have heard many cases and will have learned what works and what does not work. Often, judges will give reasons for their decisions, and these will be important to other courts when considering similar situations. For this reason, judicial opinions are long and may contain principles, analogies and statements of what judges think are important to be taken into account in future cases.
A law is also influenced by the beliefs and customs of people in a culture. For example, ideas about justice from religious books like the Vedas or the Bible are often a major influence on the laws of many countries.
Some laws are also based on science, such as the law of gravity or the principle that an object will fall to the ground when dropped. This kind of law is known as natural law. Other ideas about what the law should be come from philosophers and writers, such as Bentham’s utilitarian theories or natural lawyers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau who argued that laws reflect essentially moral and unchanging principles of nature. The law is a powerful tool for influencing politics, economics and history, and it is a central part of civil society. Modern policing, military and bureaucratic power over the daily lives of ordinary citizens pose special problems about accountability that earlier writers such as Locke or Montesquieu could not have foreseen.