Law is a system of rules that regulates the actions of people in a particular country or community. This discipline covers a broad range of issues including criminal, administrative and family law as well as international, contract and tort law. Oxford Reference provides concise definitions and in-depth, specialist encyclopedic entries across this field for researchers at every level.
A legal system lays down rules that people must obey, whether it is a constitution that clearly states a nation’s rights or more informal judicial rulings. It can also incorporate custom and culture. Law shapes politics, economics and history and can be a mediator of relations between different people.
Roscoe Pound proposed a law definition that describes it as ‘a means of social control to satisfy social wants’. He argued that laws are not neutral, but are designed to meet the needs of the political philosophy and economic interests involved in their creation. The law is a ‘normative science’, he added. Hans Kelsen, on the other hand, proposed a ‘pure theory of law’, which argues that laws define what must occur rather than explain why it happens.
The law covers many diverse fields, and each jurisdiction (or group of jurisdictions) develops its own unique approach. Common core subjects include property law, contract law, criminal law, and tort law, but areas of specialism can be found within these fields: trust law concerns the relationships between trustees and beneficiaries; labour law is about the tripartite relationship between employee, employer and trade union; evidence law examines which materials are admissible in court for a case to be built; and civil procedure and constitutional law deal with the connections between courts, the administration and the legislature.