Law is the system of rules that a particular country or community recognizes as regulating its members’ actions. Oxford Reference offers comprehensive coverage of this broad discipline through concise definitions and in-depth, specialist encyclopedic entries. Topics include criminal, tax and social security law, family and employment law, international law, and major debates in legal theory.
The law is the set of practices and customs developed by a society that regulates such activities as crime, trade, property, marriage and family, etc. It is enforced by a controlling authority.
Different jurists have given different interpretations of the law. For example, Salmond defines law as “a body of legal precepts which exists in a organized political society and is controlled by that society.” H.L.A. Hart explains that law is “a discipline and profession concerned with the customs, practices and rules of conduct recognized as binding by a society and enforced through the power of the state.”
The main function of the law is to ensure justice. The concept of justice is a complex one that can be divided into distributive and corrective justice. Distributive justice seeks to ensure a fair distribution of benefits among the members of a society, while corrective justice deals with redressing injustices. Law may also establish standards of minimum acceptable behaviour in a society (such as the criminal law, which defines certain acts as crimes if they injure or damage others or their property).