What does law do?

Although there is a great deal of academic debate about the nature of law, for the moment we can assume that law consists of a body of rules. In practice, of course, those rules will need to be made.

The fact that law involves both rules and institutions still leaves open the question of what it is that law actually does. An outline answer to this question is that law regulates social conduct with a view to enabling (or at least helping) people to live peaceably in a well-ordered society. In practice, this means that the law must identify the duties and powers of both government and individuals, as well as enforcing the duties and regulating the exercise of the powers in both cases.

More specifically, constitutional law deals with the allocation of power between different institutions (such as central government departments like the Home Office) and local authorities (such as county councils and London borough councils) as well as a range of other public bodies (such as the Environment Agency). Once constitutional law has allocated public powers to various institutions, administrative law seeks to control the way in which those institutions exercise their powers.

Moving to the level of relationships between individuals, the range of law is truly vast. For example, at random, the law regulates matters as varied as:

the ownership and transfer of property and rights in property;

the creation, functioning and winding-up of companies and business partnerships;

the right to privacy;

the rights of people who are not British citizens to enter the United Kingdom and their status when they have done so; and

the relationships which arise from marriage, civil partnership and cohabitation.

Of course, these categories are by no means watertight.

Of all the categories of law which regulate relationships between individuals, the two which you are most likely to encounter at an early stage are contract and tort, which may sometimes be put together to form the bulk of a single subject called obligations. (The idea of contract is probably obvious even to non-lawyers, but it may be worth saying that the word tort describes particular kinds of unlawful conduct, such as trespass, negligence, libel and so on, where the legal relationship between the parties arises simply as a matter of law, rather than arising from an agreement between them.) The placing of these subjects at an early stage within your studies is far from arbitrary. The fact of the matter is that they underpin many of the specialised subjects which you will encounter later on. They are, therefore, literally foundational in nature.

So far, we have approached the question ‘What is law about?’ in terms of ‘What does law do?’ but this is only a partial answer because it still leaves the more practical question of ‘How does law do it?’.