What Law Is

In Civics you met the rule of law: no one is above the law, and the law is known in advance. This course asks the next questions. What is a law? Where does it come from? How do lawyers and judges reason with it? We start with the first question, because the answer shapes everything after it.

Key idea

Law is the set of rules that a government makes or recognizes and that courts and officials enforce. It overlaps with morality (what is right and wrong) and custom (what people usually do), but it differs from both in who makes it and how it is enforced.

Three kinds of rules. They often agree, but they are found and enforced in different ways.
	Law	Morality	Custom and manners
Who makes it	legislatures, agencies, courts, the people (through constitutions)	conscience, religion, philosophy, a community's shared sense of right	the habits of a group
How it is enforced	courts, police, fines, prison, money judgments	guilt, blame, the judgment of others	social pressure: raised eyebrows, lost friends
How you find it	written sources: constitutions, statutes, regulations, court opinions	reflection and teaching	watching and asking

Why it works

Why have law at all, when most people already follow their consciences? Because people disagree about what is right, and some disputes must be settled one way or the other. Law gives a public, settled answer that applies to everyone, made by a known process and backed by the power of the state. It lets strangers plan (a contract will be enforced), protects people from harm (assault is punished), and coordinates choices that could go either way (everyone drives on the right). Morality cannot do those jobs alone, because it has no single author and no courthouse.

Law and morality: two classic views

Philosophers have long debated how law and morality connect. In the natural law tradition (Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, and the "Laws of Nature" in the Declaration of Independence), human law takes its authority partly from a higher standard of justice, so a gravely unjust rule is a defective law. Legal positivists (John Austin, H. L. A. Hart) answer that a rule is law because of its source: it was made by the recognized process. Whether it is just is a separate and important question. Hart and Lon Fuller debated these views in the Harvard Law Review in 1958, and the debate continues. Both sides agree that law and morality differ and that both matter; they disagree about how to describe the line between them.

Worked example: Legal, and right?

Sort each act two ways, as legal or illegal and as widely thought right or wrong: (a) breaking a casual promise to help a friend move; (b) driving 40 mph in a 35 mph zone on an empty road at dawn; (c) before 1865, helping a person escape slavery.

(a) Breaking a casual promise is usually legal: a social promise is not a contract. Many people think it is wrong.
(b) It is illegal: the speed limit is a rule. Many people see little moral wrong in it, but the law still applies.
(c) The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it a federal crime, so it was illegal. Today it is almost universally seen as right.
So "legal" and "right" can come apart in both directions. Law is identified by its sources and enforcement, not by whether we approve.

Answer: (a) legal, often thought wrong; (b) illegal, often thought minor; (c) illegal then, widely thought right.

Tap a card, then a group. "Show me" explains each one.

Common mistake

Treating "legal" and "right" as the same thing. Some lawful acts are widely thought wrong (breaking a casual promise), and some unlawful acts were once widely thought right (helping people escape slavery). When you ask "is it legal?", look for a source (a constitution, statute, regulation or case) and an enforcer. When you ask "is it right?", you are asking a moral question, which the law may or may not answer the same way.

This is an educational course, not legal advice.

What Law Is

Law and morality: two classic views

Practice

Builds on

Leads to

Sources and further reading