Law is a system of rules that a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members. It includes both custom and legislation. Law is a broad discipline with many sub-fields: criminal law, family law, employment law, administrative law, property law, and biolaw, to name just a few. Oxford Reference offers comprehensive coverage of this important area with thousands of concise definitions and in-depth, specialist encyclopedic entries.
Unlike the natural sciences, which try to describe what is happening in the universe, law tries to explain why it is happening and how it should happen. In this way it is much more like the social sciences and humanities than the physical or biological sciences. Law focuses on the rules that govern human behavior, and thus it examines such things as the nature of contracts, the rights of citizens, and the power structure in a nation.
Different schools of law theory have shaped our understanding of what the law is and how it works. The utilitarian school, founded by John Austin and Bentham, defines the law as a set of commandments (backed with the threat of sanctions) from a sovereign (or “supreme being”) to his political subjects. Other schools of law, such as that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argue that the law is an unchanging set of moral principles, and that these should be reflected in a constitutional or statutory framework.
The practice of determining what the law is in a given situation is known as legal interpretation. It is a complex process that involves gathering inputs, including legal texts, the actions and mental states of various legal actors, and custom. These inputs are then analyzed to determine what the law is. There is a wide-ranging debate about which methods of analyzing these inputs are the correct ones. But what is clear is that legal interpretation seeks to find what the law actually is, not just its linguistic meaning.
Once the law is determined, it must be enforced. This is done through a combination of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. This is known as the separation of powers, and it ensures that no one person can exercise absolute power over others.
Sometimes a statute may seem to conflict with another, and the common law maxim “lex specialis derogate legi generali” or “the law of a particular case overrides general laws” applies. Additionally, statutes should be interpreted in pari materia or together with other statutes that cover the same subject matter. A construction that renders a statute meaningless or inconsistent with another, or that produces an absurd or unreasonable result, isn’t the correct one. Hence, legal interpretation is both an art and a science.
