What is law about?
The best way to approach the academic study of anything is to ask: what is this subject about? This question may be important for two reasons.
First, those who start to study a subject like law without giving at least some thought to its nature are likely to find themselves adrift upon a vast ocean of apparently random – and therefore confusing – detail.
Some knowledge of the nature of law, even if only in outline, will help to provide a framework within which you can organise and understand as much of that detail as possible. More particularly, this understanding will enable you to see how the detail contributes (or, in some cases, fails to contribute) to the coherence of the body of law as a whole.Secondly, it will give you an important insight into how you will be required to think and the intellectual skills you will need if you are to study the subject successfully.
So, returning to the initial question, what is law about? We will approach this question by asking two further questions:
What does law do? and
How does it do it?
We will consider these questions in turn.
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