Law Definition & Meaning
Bentham and Austin argued for law’s positivism; that actual law is totally separate from “morality”. Kant was also criticised by Friedrich Nietzsche, who rejected the principle of equality, and believed that law emanates from the need to energy, and cannot be labeled as “ethical” or “immoral”. Definitions of law usually increase the query of the extent to which law incorporates morality. John Austin’s utilitarian answer was that law is “instructions, backed by risk of sanctions, from a sovereign, to whom people have a behavior of obedience”. Natural attorneys on the opposite aspect, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argue that law reflects basically moral and unchangeable laws of nature. The idea of “natural law” emerged in historic Greek philosophy concurrently and in connection with the notion of justice, and re-entered the mainstream of Western culture through the writings of Thomas Aquinas, notably his Treatise on Law.
Civil law jurisdictions recognise custom as …