On Law

Because the word "law" has come up and will continue to come up throughout the blog, I thought it might be helpful to explain how I see the word and its various meanings.

One meaning of the word law, and indeed probably the meaning that comes most frequently to mind among the majority of English speakers, is a written codification of prescribed or proscribed behavior, produced by a state's legislative authority. This is law in the statutory sense. Law in this sense might also include treaties and documents establishing the ground law for a state such as a Constitution.

Another meaning of the word law is the reference to the legal profession and its products. This might refer to things like case law, lawyers' (robed or unrobed) interpretation of legislated laws, and really any other aspect of judicial or tribunal legal matters.

Another meaning of the word law is the reference to the enforcers of the law and their interpretation of the law. This usage has a somewhat colloquial flavor when the word law is
actually used with this meaning, but its impact as law is nevertheless powerful in the lives of those confronted by the state's hired gunmen. This form of law includes everything from the arbitrary decision of individual police officers to either punish or ignore individual violations of statutory law all the way up to executive orders and other policy decisions from a state's chief executive officer.

All three of these meanings refer to laws imposed on men by other men because the lawmen (for lack of a better term) believe they are better fit to decide how the governed ought to behave than the governed themselves are. The rationale for this arrogated superiority might be a high-minded appeal to some philosophy of justice or "reason free from passion", or it might simply be a hunch that a given individual should be spied on, arrested, or even battered or killed. In this blog, I frequently refer to this sort of law as the law of men. I also refer to it as bondage, force, coercion, and all sorts of other nasty things.

There are other meanings of law used here, though.

One additional meaning is the sense in phrases like the Law of Gravity or Boyle's Law or the Law of Cosines. These are laws not in the sense that man has decided how the world ought to work, but in the sense that man has observed a certain regularity that seems to hold true, or fairly close to true, in all or nearly all situations. Some laws of this type are absolutely true (such as the Law of Cosines for planar trigonometry), while others are only probabilistic or approximate models based on readily observable data (such as Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation). Nevertheless, laws of this sort are not governed by man at all, but by reality that lies external to mankind.

Another, similar sense can be found in phrases like the Law of Supply and Demand, or Gresham's Law, or even Godwin's Law. Unlike laws like Boyle's Law or the Law of Cosines, but like the legislative, judicial, or executive laws discussed above, these are laws relating to human behavior. However, like Boyle's Law and unlike legislated law, these laws try to explain human behavior that has been observed rather than prescribing or proscribing certain behaviors. For example, the Law of Supply and Demand contains the idea that if demand for a good increases while its supply remains constant, its price will increase. That doesn't mean anyone will go to jail for selling it at the same price he would have sold it before the spike in demand — it just means the buyer would probably have been willing to pay more (and most sellers would have charged more). These laws simply try to explain certain regular patterns of behavior that seem common to all mankind.

There is another kind of law that is similar to such behavioral laws as the Law of Supply and Demand but more similar in feel, perhaps, to legislated law. That kind of law is the customary law of a given group of people. If the group is small, the law is usually called a custom or habit or a tradition or maybe even a rule — my family ate waffles for dinner on Sunday as a rule while I was a child, for example, just as we traditionally ate hard-boiled eggs on Easter Sunday that we had dyed the night before. When a group is larger, like a nation, these customary behaviors are often called laws. For example, the customary laws of the Anglo-Saxon people were the foundation for English common law, and that body of customary law forms the basis of the legal systems of most of the United States as well as most of the member states of the British Commonwealth. This kind of law often seems to prescribe behavior, but in fact, it is really better viewed as a description of the kind of natural order that any group of people in close association will tend to develop. The body of customary law is culture specific and is therefore unique to the group that lives by it, unlike the Law of Supply and Demand and other laws meant to describe universal tendencies in human behavior. It is also usually a rich reservoir of cultural lore and vitality. All groups develop a body of customary law over time, and that law body of customary law is probably the primary contributing factor in the maintenance of what we consider orderly society. In a very important way, this kind of law belongs more to the class of laws like Boyle's or Gresham's than the class of laws like the Constitution or the IRS code: the body of customary laws is not enforced or even codifiable but rather a description of naturally occurring tendencies. Furthermore, this kind of law is very important in discussions of anarchy.

Finally, there is the law of God. In a previous post, I talked about how God's law is not enforced the way legal statutes are. As a Latter-day Saint, I have grown up believing that God's law is simply a statement of the behaviors that are necessary to have the kind of happiness and power that God has. I am not certain that this is taught explicitly in the Church of Jesus Christ, but I think it is implicit in the doctrines of the Church and generally believed. We know that God is our father and he loves us and he wants us to become like him. We also know that he is far, far wiser than we are now. We also know that he has told us how we ought to live, and that he has promised us that if we do what he says, we will become like him someday. I think the only logical conclusion to draw from all of this is that he knows how to be like him and he wants to tell us what to do to enjoy the same kind of existence, and that those things are simply the explanation of natural laws. It could be compared to a karate instructor who teaches his students to move in particular ways so that they can get more power. The instructor understands the principles that naturally govern moving one's body to maximize martial power, and he gives his students commands in order to impart those principles to them. So God, I think, understands the principles that govern eternal life, and he gives us commands to try to teach us those principles so that we can have eternal life, too. So the law of God is a description of natural law as well.

All these laws fall into two groups. The first includes all laws that are prescriptions invented by men for the purpose of planning or controlling human interaction. The second group includes all laws that are descriptions of naturally occurring causes and effects, both in human interaction and in all other aspects of the universe. Laws of the first type are usually the kind of thing anarchism opposes. Laws of the second type usually are not.

I think laws of the second type, the descriptions of naturally occurring regularities, are natural laws, and therefore, in some sense, laws of God. That doesn't mean I think God really cares that my family habitually ate waffles for dinner on Sundays, but the law of waffles on Sunday was a kind of order we naturally fell into, and I think that kind of voluntary, self-generated order is the sort of thing God wants us to develop our capacity for. As the Creator of the universe, he has to be pretty organized — if he wants us to become like him, you would think he wants us to be organized to. The voluntary, self-generated kind of order helps us exercise our individual capacity for order and organization. On the other hand, the coerced order imposed by states and whatnot discourages the development of individual orderliness by encouraging our reliance on the orderliness dictated by our fellowmen. In that sense, then, I think that habitually eating waffles on Sundays was a law of God, or a godly law — law the way God intended it.