Online Encyclopedia Search Tool

Your Online Encyclopedia

 

Online Encylopedia and Dictionary Research Site

Online Encyclopedia Free Search Online Encyclopedia Search    Online Encyclopedia Browse    welcome to our free dictionary for your research of every kind

Online Encyclopedia



Law

(Redirected from Legal theory)
This article is about law in society. For other possible meanings, see law (disambiguation).

Law (a loanword from Danish-Norwegian lov), in politics and jurisprudence, is a set of rules or norms of conduct which mandate, proscribe or permit specified relationships among people and organizations; as well as punishments for those who do not follow the established rules of conduct.

Contents

Introduction

Law is the formal codification of customs which have achieved such acceptance as become the enforced norm. The process of acceptance is accelerated by the existence of legislative bodies which seek to impose laws.

Law involves the legislation and regulation of statutes; as well as the resolution of disputes. In the civil law system codification is also an attempt to structure the law according to fundamental ethical principles to create a sense of order and simplicity that all members of society can comprehend, not merely university trained jurists. Stating the law in simple, precise terms, understandable to the lay person without a specialized legal education, is the only way they can reasonably obey it or be fairly sanctioned for not obeying it.

This overlaps with the idea of a formal social legal code as understood in ethics. This may be understandable to the educated lay person but perhaps not to the ordinary lay person. For example, one can explain the idea of precedent more easily than that of the reasonable man, but it may be much harder to explain why precedent is "fair" to one without "higher education". The following are examples of such lay explanations of different branches of law, and theories of law.

In addition to being part of the societal framework law is also an academic discipline and a profession. See Law (academic), jurisprudence, and lawyer.

Further discussion

Most laws and legal systems—at least in the Western world—are quite similar in their essential themes, arising from similar values and similar social, economic, and political conditions, and they typically differ less in their substantive content than in their jargon and procedures. Communication between legal systems is the focus of legal translation and legal lexicography, which deals with the principles of producing a law dictionary.

One of the fundamental similarities across different legal systems is that, to be of general approval and observation, a law has to appear to be public, effective, and legitimate, in the sense that it has to be available to the knowledge of the citizen in common places or means, it needs to contain instruments to grant its application, and it has to be issued under given formal procedures from a recognized authority.

In the context of most legal systems, laws are enacted through the processes of constitutional charter, constitutional amendment, legislation, executive order, rulemaking, and adjudication; within Common law jurisdictions, rulings by judges are an important additional source of legal rules.

However, de facto laws also come into existence through custom and tradition. (See generally Consuetudinary law; Anarchist law.)

Law has an anthropological dimension. In order to have a culture of law, people must dwell in a society where a government exists whose authority is hard to evade and generally recognised as legitimate. People forego personal revenge or self-help and choose instead to take their grievances before the government and its agents, who arbitrate disputes and enforce penalties.

This behaviour is contrasted with the culture of honor, where respect for persons and groups stems from fear of the disproportionate revenge they may exact if their person, property, or prerogatives are not respected. Cultures of law must be maintained. They can be eroded by declining respect for the law, achieved either by weak government unable to wield its authority, or by burdensome restrictions that attempt to forbid behaviour prevalent in the culture or in some subculture of the society. When a culture of law declines, there is a possibility that an undesirable culture of honor will arise in its place.

A particular society or community adopts a specific set of laws to regulate the behavior of its own members, to order life in its political territory, to grant or acknowledge the rights and privileges of its citizens and other people who may come under the jurisdiction of its courts, and to resolve disputes.

There are several distinct laws and legal traditions, and each jurisdiction has its own set of laws and its own legal system. Individually codified laws are known as statutes, and the collective body of laws relating to one subject or emanating from one source are usually identified by specific reference. (E.g., Roman law, Common law, and Criminal law.)

Moreover, the several different levels of government each produce their own laws, though the extent to which law is centralized varies. Thus, at any one place there can be conflicting laws in force at the local, regional, state, national, or international levels. (See conflict of laws, Preemption of State and Local Laws.)

Areas of law, a sampling

This list is not comprehensive.

  • Civil law, not to be confused with the civil legal system, has several meanings:
    • Secular law is the legal system of a non-theocratic government, such as that which developed in England, especially during the reign of Henry II
    • Private law regulates relationships between persons and organizations including contracts and responsible behaviour such as through liability through negligence. This body of law enforces statutes or the common law by allowing a party, whose rights have been violated, to collect damages from a defendant. Where monetary damages are deemed insufficient, civil court may offer other remedies in equity; such as forbidding someone to do an act (eg; an injunction) or formally changing someone's legal status (eg; divorce). This body of law includes the law of torts in common law systems, or in civilian systems, the Law of Obligations.
  • Common law is derived from Anglo-Saxon customary law, also referred to as judge-made law, as it developed over the course of many centuries in the English courts. Judges' decisions are heavily influenced, and sometimes actually bound, by precedents set by the judges in previous decisions on related matters.
  • Space law regulates events occurring outside Earth's atmosphere. This field is in its infancy.

Legal subject areas

Administrative law - Admiralty - Alternative dispute resolution - Appellate review - Brehon Laws - Civil procedure - Civil rights - Commercial law - Comparative law - Consuetudinary law - Contracts - Constitutional law - Courts of England and Wales - Corporations law - Criminal law - Criminal procedure - Election law - Environmental law - Equity - Evidence - Family law - Fiduciary - Human rights - Immigration - Intellectual property - Jurisprudence - Law and economics - Agency - Law of Obligations - Labor law - Land use - List of items for which possession is restricted - Military law - Philosophy of law - Practice of law - Private law - Procedural law - Property law - Public Health law - Public Law - Religious law - Statutory law - Tax law - Technology law - Torts - Trusts and estates - Cyber law - Water law

Subjects auxiliary to law

Government - Legal history - Law and literature - Political science

Terms, case law, legislation and other resources

Legal books

Further reading

  • Cheyenne Way: Conflict & Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence, Karl N. Llewellyn and E. Adamson Hoebel, University of Oklahoma Press, 1983, trade paperback, 374 pages, ISBN 0806118555
  • The Bilingual LSP Dictionary. Principles and Practice for Legal language, Sandro Nielsen, Gunter Narr Verlag 1994.
  • Other books by Karl N. Llewellyn http://browse.addall.com/Browse/Author/2088479-1

See also

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Law

External links

Wikiversity, is developing courses on Law.
  • Law & Legal News & Reference http://www.HavenWorks.com/law
  • Essentials of Law-Related Education. ERIC Digest. http://www.ericdigests.org/1996-3/law.htm
  • WorldLII - The World Legal Information Institute http://www.worldlii.org



Last updated: 02-02-2005 05:46:21
Last updated: 02-26-2005 05:08:48