Introduction to Law and Other Social Sciences
Distinguish between:
What is law? What is the law?
Substantive law, Procedural law, Jurisdiction and Jurisprudence - Science and philosophy of Law)
Is the definition of law a task which can be undertaken irrespective of the type of society in question?
1) Robison Crusoe alone on an island; he saw cannibals killing a prisoner and eating him. What law are they subject to?
2) Nottingham Galley in 1710: law of the sea - another case of cannibalism on the high seas.
3) In the Amazonean jungle, tribesmen kill a child in performance of religious practice of sacrifice to the Gods.
4) In a modern civilized country, abortion, euthanasia?
Why define law?
What does a theory try to do?
What is the relationship between theory and practice?
What is the use of a model?
What is morality? A system of ideas of right and wrong conduct:
The quality of being in conformity with standards of right or good conduct.
Emile Durkheim
Couverture du livre de Emile Durkheim, Le Socialis...
English: Emile Durkheim's grave. Italiano: La tomb...Morality is seen by modern positivists as lacking rules authorizing particular persons to exercise power and institute change.
The Roman Empire, according to some, collapsed because of an inner moral decayâ¦
The concern of the moral philosophers is to establish a position from which law can be critically assessed to establish that there is a logically or morally prior good to which law must conform
What is natural law?
The term "natural law" is ambiguous. It refers to a type of moral theory, as well as to a type of legal theory. It does not refer to the laws of nature, the laws that science aims to describe.
According to natural law ethical theory, the moral standards that govern human behavior are, in some sense, objectively derived from the nature...