The Nature of Law

Hello. I'm Kevin To. I'm a a professor of velocity law

at faculty of laws at the University of College London.

And today I'm gonna talk about the nature of law.

Now this is a a topic that

may interest you, but you also you may know nothing about it.

Today, what I'll do is I'll raise some questions about laws

and what we're thinking about when we're thinking about the

nature of law. Now to ask what the nature of something is,

that's the somewhat unusual question you may think.

It's not something that you often think about.

So in order to get you,

thinking more naturally about it. So here I have four pairs

of questions. First one is the current tax system in New

Zealand just. And then you may not know how to go about

answering that question.

So the next question you may ask is to step back from that

question and ask, what is the nature of justice?

Second pair of questions, what is difficult root of two? Now, again,

that's something that mathematicians may have

difficulty with.

So we may ask the next question what is the nature of numbers.

Thirdly,

do human activities cause global warming. And here,

this may also become controversial,

so you may take a step back and ask what is the nature of causation.

Worthly,

do I ever know what someone is actually thinking and here

you may wonder what the nature of knowledge is.

So in each of these pairs of questions,

you may have some difficulties in answering the first question,

and that may motivate you to ask the second question by

taking a step back. And something similar can be,

done about laws. And here we have another pair of questions,

first question, does the newspapers

identification of a person as homosexual

amount to an illegal defamation?

Now here, this is a difficult legal question for some people,

and then that may motivate you to take a step back and ask

what is the nature of defamation or more generally

what is the nature of law? Now still,

you may think that this is not a question that easily comes to your mind.

So here are some different ways of formulating the questions,

the same question, what are laws,

Where do laws come from

or what possible facts about a community amount to its

possession of law?

So those are just alternative ways of asking the same question.

Now still It's a daunting question to ask what the nature

of something is. So let us focus a little bit more.

Let's let's focus on the various rules or norms that may

govern our lives. Here I have a number of things, groupings of things,

of rules, norms, principles, or laws that seem to constrain how

we live how we should behave and so forth and so on.

I've grouped them into three categories,

and the categories may not be uncontroversial,

but here at least initially

they may have some intuitive,

offense. So first group of things, physical laws.

We are obviously governed by things like law of gravity.

Right? They're also biological laws.

They are laws governing what kind of traits parents can pass

down to their children and their economic laws.

These are laws governing supply and demand.

What happens to housing prices if inflation happens,

these are laws that some people call laws of nature. They

apply to us the government lives. Now in the second group,

I have somewhat different set of rules or norms or principles.

So rules of morality.

You are supposed to behave in certain ways,

not behave in certain other ways,

and there are also epistemological norms.

What could we call epistemological norms These are

norms that we should follow to form right beliefs.

So people who believe in conspiracy theories of various

sorts people who do not believe in vaccination,

these people are flouting what we might call epistemological

norms. Now notice that The first group of laws or norms,

physical laws, biological laws,

and economic laws are quite different from rules of

morality and epistemological norms on the other hand.

Right? We might think that in the first group,

we have rules or norms that apply to us no matter what we want to do,

whereas rules of morality and epistemological norms,

these are things that we can actually flout

We have choices in how we behave and whether we obey

these laws at all.

So these are quite different and so we should have different theories

about the nature of these rules or norms. Now I have put

human laws In a third category, here I have three things in

this third category, rules of etiquette,

game rules, and finally laws.

Now I think it's intuitive to think that these rules or norms

are quite a bit different from the ones that I put in the

first two categories.

Right, exactly how they're different.

That's something that philosophers debate about.

Okay. So notice that depending on which kind of rules

or knowledge we talk about,

we would probably come up with different theory about what the

nature of that set of rules is.

So for example, there has been a very,

traditionally very popular and influential conception of

nature of a set of rules.

Lot of people call this theological volunteerism.

This is the idea that a particular set of rules are

commands of god.

Now this is a controversial controversial position about

many kind of rules.

For one thing,

some people may not believe in the existence of god.

But even if you thought that god exists,

you may think that this kind of theory,

theological volunteerism, is appropriate,

responsible for some theories, some set of rules,

but not for some other rules.

So one might think that moral rules for example could be

plausibly conceived as commands of god,

and you may also think that what we call laws of nature

such as physical laws are things that god has commanded,

but we would not think the same way about etiquette rules, for example.

Etiquette rules are not things that god has commanded,

is something much more human made or more plausibly thought of human made.

And for similar reasons, we might think that human laws are

quite different from moral rules or laws of physics

because they're more like etiquette rules or game rules.

In many respects.

So depending on what kind of rules we're talking about,

we are likely to have different theories of the nature of that

set of rules And so we are ready to jump into thinking about

the nature of laws.

Now in subsequent modules, we talk about three different

leading theories about the nature of law and we begin to

think about how exactly

these famous philosophers try to theorize about the nature of law.