Law is the body of rules governing human conduct, establishing standards and ensuring order in society. It also serves to resolve disputes and protect liberties and rights. While there is not a single definition of law, scholars and philosophers have suggested numerous ideas about it.
Law has many branches, including civil and criminal, corporate, personal injury, international, intellectual property, labor and environmental laws. Each of these fields has different subfields within it, such as contract law, tort law and family law. Each branch of the law is used to address different legal questions and concerns, such as how a business should be run or how an injured person should be compensated for their injuries.
Many of the fields of law have been developed to solve specific problems or meet certain needs in society. For example, tort law covers civil cases of negligence and liability involving damages to people and businesses. Family law includes issues of divorce, custody and child support. Criminal law aims to prevent crimes and provide punishment for those who commit them. International law relates to the rights of people and nations to live and work in other countries, to acquire and lose citizenship, to obtain asylum and to solve border problems.
A key debate about the nature of law has focused on whether it incorporates morality and, if so, what form this morality should take. Utilitarian theory emphasized the practical benefits of law, a view exemplified by John Austin’s definition of law as “commands, backed by threat of sanctions, from a sovereign to whom men have a habit of obedience.” Natural lawyers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, asserted that law reflects natural laws of nature, which are moral and unchangeable.
One of the most important parts of a lawyer’s job is to interpret a statute or constitutional provision in the light of its history, purpose, context and intent. There are several different methods of doing this, which have been referred to as interpretation theories. Intentionalists give primacy to the intentions of the lawmakers (the legislature in statutory law or the framers and ratifiers of a constitution), even when these conflicts with the literal meaning of the text. Others, such as Hart and Rawlings, have advocated a form of constitutional interpretation that stresses the importance of the legislative process and the historical development of the law.
A final, and sometimes neglected, consideration of the law is its role as a social institution. Roscoe Pound proposed that the primary purpose of law is to control human behavior and satisfy social wants. This is done through the use of coercive power and a system of legal technique. It is therefore, a social institution in the same way that religion or the military are.