The law is rather ambiguous.
The word “Law”, and many of its accompanying terms and phrases are held in remarkably varying perceptions by people of different groups and communities. As a result, it has been appropriated beyond recognition in some contexts, with its meaning and implication being unique to whichever situation it exists in.
But today I am setting out to answer what the law was originally meant to be, and what it is today.
In the present world, the textbook definition of the law is that it is the set of rules that govern the actions of individuals and communities and is enforceable by a designated authority through the use of penalties. Yet there is a contradiction of oxymoronic proportions within this definition, that the law is labelled as a set of rules. The problem lies in the nature of what a rule is: something objective that maintains right or wrong as either black or white. The notion of a grey area in-between simply does not exist in a theoretical sense. Having said that, it can be argued that the application of a rule is not as black or white as it should be, but it is indisputable that the application of a rule should be black or white.
By applying the same logic to law, the issue becomes more visible. Laws should be completely objective, with a clear distinction between right and wrong enabling the fair treatment of members of a community governed by those laws. Yet in practice, it could not be further from the truth. In fact, there is an entire profession of people dedicated to showing that laws are not quite as objective as they seem: lawyers (especially barristers and trial lawyers). If everything was clearly either right or wrong, trials would be a far simpler process, where the law could not be interpreted in different ways but only applied to the facts of the case in one, immutable form.
The basis of much law in the UK, for example, comes from common law, which is unwritten laws that come from precedents established by past court decisions. Similar cases might be decided in different ways, which further compounds the potential confusion and subjectivity that surrounds the law.
However, laws are not as fluid as this evidence might lead you to believe, but rather more like a metal sword that is perpetually being heated and bent into an incrementally different shape. They shift with the times but can not be altered significantly on a case-by-case basis.
The famous thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat that demonstrates quantum superposition perfectly shows how the law is perceived: the number of interpretations of a law is infinite until it is applied, at which time there is only one true interpretation. Ultimately the law does have a correct interpretation for each specific case, and most of the time that interpretation prevails and the law is applied accurately.
Having viewed both sides, it is reasonable to believe that laws are not just a bunch of set-in-stone rules, but instead, they are a quasi-objective guide as to how to/not to go through life.
So to amalgamate all this information together, one can arrive at a new conclusion as to what the law truly is: the set of instructions that govern how individuals and communities ought to act, which may be enforceable by a designated authority through the use of penalties.
(Photo: Getty Images/iStockPhoto)
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