Morality, The Nature of Law, Denouncing Anarchism

• Law is a term which is used in many different senses.
• All of these senses have in common the fact that law is a general rule of conduct.
• There are many types of law; such as the laws of physics, the laws of morality, the law of god, natural justice, etc.
• However, to a lawyer “law” has one specific meaning: the body of principles recognised and applied by the state in administration of justice. 
• These are the rules used and acted on by the courts.
• If is different to other types of law in that:
o Legal rules are obligatory; the citizen has to obey them.
o Legal rules are created by a formal, elaborate, and sometimes solemn procedure. 
o Disputes about the breach and/or applicability of them are subject to a special procedure by way of trials in the courts. 

Law and Morality

• There is a close relationship between law and morality.
• A legal system would not survive for long if the rules did not reflect the moral views of the community it represents.
• But the law also influences moral values as well.
• The nature of legal and moral rules differ as follows:
o In morality the rule itself is important, while any sanctions there may be for its breach tend to be unorganised and subjective. However, in law though rules themselves are not always important, there is a regular and organised system for imposing sanctions. 
o Rules of morality, unlike rules of law, are immune from deliberate and instantaneous change. 
o Legal liability, unlike moral liability, may be independent of fault.
o It is an important aim of law to provide certainty and therefore to draw firm lines. Consequently, the emphasis is on a category of cases rather than the merits of the particular case. Morality, on the other hand, is more flexible and less clear cut. It is dependant on personal points of view and the understanding of values and ethics in society.
o Some laws are moral; others may be regarded as immoral whilst others are amoral.
Law is made by the supreme, ruling authority in a state. It may be that the state has a Parliamentary democracy or that the authority is a dictatorship. When a law is made, it is still law even if it does have dire consequences for certain areas of the population. It is still good law no matter how abhorrent, provided it has been created and imposed by the ruling body of the state. 

Morality tends to be accepted as the general consensus of behaviour within a society. Sometimes moral behaviour and the law will coincide and become the accepted rules of society. Thus, ‘thou shalt not kill’ and ‘thou shalt not steal’ are rules which are generally accepted as being both moral and legal rules of society. 

Law and Justice

• It is sometimes said that law exists to achieve justice either between man and man, or in human society.
• It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to establish the nature of justice, and how it is to be distinguished from law and from morality.
• ‘Justice’ must be distinguished between ‘formal and substantial’ justice. 
o As a formal requirement, justice seems to require that rules should be applied equally in all situations and to all persons to which they relate. 
o A system of law should aim to achieve justice in this formal sense. 

o Substantial justice on the other hand is concerned with the content of law,
o and a law will only be regarded as substantially just is it conforms to whatever criteria are to be applies in deciding what is just in the particular circumstances.
• In this sense, justice is little more than a synonym for the whole moral code operative in the particular community in question.
Thus, the word ‘justice’ can be used either as broadly corresponding to the meaning of morality in general, in which event it adds little to the discussion, or it can be used more usefully in the rather narrow formal sense. In this case it represents only one relatively limited feature or the moral code, though none the less one of considerable importance in the functioning of a legal system.