Nobody has managed to define law, and some say we should keep trying
Scholars have hunted for a universally acceptable definition of law and failed. One jurist argued the word means different, even irreconcilable, things in different settings. Thurman Arnold put the paradox neatly: defining law is plainly impossible, yet the effort to define it should never be abandoned.
Candidate definitions abound. John Austin defined law as a sovereign's order enforced by threatened punishment. H. L. A. Hart saw a system of rules, some governing conduct and others telling officials how to make, change and apply them. Ronald Dworkin treated law as an interpretive practice aimed at justice, and Oliver Wendell Holmes offered a blunt alternative: law is simply a prediction of what courts will actually do. Thomas Aquinas, centuries earlier, described it as a rational ordering for the common good, issued by whoever cares for the community.
The sharpest dispute concerns morality. Natural law thinkers hold that law reflects unchanging moral truths; positivists such as Bentham and Austin insisted real law is entirely separate from morals. In 1934 Hans Kelsen proposed that every legal system rests on a basic norm, a Grundnorm, telling us to obey it. His opponent Carl Schmitt rejected the whole idea, arguing that emergencies reveal the limits of any legal rulebook.
History offers a long chain of codes. Egyptian law, dating back to around 3000 BC, rested on the idea of Ma'at. The Sumerian ruler Ur-Nammu produced the first known law code by the twenty-second century BC, written as if-then cases, and around 1760 BC Hammurabi had his laws carved on stone pillars set up across Babylon for all to see. Athens had no single word for law, distinguishing divine law, human decree and custom. India's Arthashastra and Manusmriti became foundational treatises, and Roman law, codified under Theodosius II and Justinian, returned to European study around the eleventh century.
The English word itself came from Old Norse, where the singular meant something laid down or fixed. Today legal systems divide broadly between civil law, codified by a central body, and common law, where judges' rulings create binding precedent.
Source: Law
