Law is a set of rules that are often made by a government, and citizens must follow or face punishment. For example, if you are caught stealing, you may be fined or put in jail depending on the law broken and the punishment that was set up for that law.
Legal systems can be split into civil law and common law, but modern scholars argue that the distinction is less important than it once was. Some aspects of the legal system are typical of both systems, while others are more distinctive.
Commonly, the term “law” refers to all laws of a nation or state. This includes criminal law, which deals with a person’s rights when they are accused of breaking the law, and civil law, which deals with a citizen’s rights when they are involved in court cases.
The laws of a nation are designed to keep the peace, maintain the status quo, preserve individual rights, protect minorities against majorities, promote social justice and provide for orderly social change. Some legal systems are better at keeping the peace and maintaining the status quo than others.
Various theories of law exist, but they all share an understanding that a legal system committed to rights is oriented towards the ideal of treating the individual person as law’s primary unit of concern. The philosophies of natural lawyers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Austin, and those of the utilitarians of John Stuart Mill and John Bentham are all examples of theories of law that emphasize a moralistic approach to the nature of law.