For my final post, I thought I’d try to sum up the important things I will be taking away from this class. One of the topics we’d been discussing was why people follow laws. From what I can recall, being told that something is the law (as a child) simply meant that it had to be followed; it was no different than why things fall on the ground or why people die. Having been brought up in a democratic society, there was also the belief indoctrinated that laws are designed for the best of the community, and they simply are the right thing to do. Perhaps I was too naive to have accepted this so easily, but prior to this class, as long as something could be justified in legal terms, I thought ‘well...that would obviously be the right thing to do since some wise people would have thought about it.’ Reading about law in this class has brought me out of the myth that what the law says is always right and that’s how the society should function, and has helped me to take a more critical look at how the legal systems are formed.
There are various beliefs that legal systems are formed on, which the society as a whole imbibes. Having a naturalistic or a positivistic notion about how laws should be framed would seem to change what is held as right and wrong in a community. This has made me realize that there are underlying factors that influence the formation of law and that they all attempt to endorse some sort of a thought process, which may or may not be the right thing to do. This has also made the concept of change very valuable to me. As long as time is a reality, so would change be, and this shows that laws can never quite be perfect, but only accommodating the current trends and ideologies, which are all subject to change.
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Prior to the class I followed law primarily because I thought it was the ‘right’ thing to do. In other words, I adhered to the law because of the existence of a moral, normative force. Yet, as I grew up and became politically socialized, I started to question the legitimacy, or rather, the fairness of laws. Were laws just? Did they promote equality? Did they place undue burden on sects of the population?
ReplyDeleteEven after taking this class, I tend to evaluate the law in moral terms. I don’t necessarily think that trait is limited to you, bkaush, or me, but is prevalent throughout the world. For example, laws that promote security at the expense of civil liberties, such as the PATRIOT act, are subject to intense political controversy. We have a tendency to focus on the moral implications of laws instead of their ability to encourage social harmony.