Study the texts given below, use additional information resources and deliver a report on your special field of knowledge.
The Nature of Law
The law affects us all from the moment we are born. We may not like it, but for better or for worse, we live in a society that is bound by rules.
Society, by one means or another, has developed a formal system of rules which are designed to be both observed and enforced. If an individual breaks a legal rule he or she will be penalised in some way. That is what the law is about: it consists of minimum standards of conduct which all members of society are expected to follow.
The concept of justice lies deep in the conscience of all civilized peoples. What that justice is, however, a reflection of the customs and laws of that civilization, and derives from the morality of the people as expounded by their law makers.
All civilized societies have had their codes of law, at least from the time of Hammurabi, the founder of the Babylonian Empire in the third millenium BC. Law is the latticework of civilization and throughout history a few outstanding law makers have shone forth like stars, to illumine the course of justice, some like Solomon as judges, others such as Justinian as great codifiers.
Yet the thought that there can be a theory of law, that is a set of systematically related true propositions about the nature of law, has been challenged, and from several directions. None of the challenges is entirely successful.
A theory of law in a narrow sense refers to an explanation of the nature of law.It is a sense central to philosophical reflection about the law throughout its history.
A theory of law is successful if it meets two criteria: first, it consists of propositions about the law which are necessarily true, and, second, they explain what the law is.
Naturally, the essential properties of the law are universal characteristics of law. They are to be found in law wherever and whenever it exists. Moreover, these properties are universal properties of the law not accidentally, and not because of any prevailing economic or social circumstances, but because there is no law without them.
The most usual meaning of the phrase 'the law' is that of a legal rule. Legal rules influence many different aspects of life. Secondly, “the law” is the complete body of all those individual rules that bind society together. Thirdly, the phrase may also mean the process by which rules are made and applied. The development, the content and the application of those rules add up to a legal system, complete with judges, courts, solicitors, barristers, police and indeed politicians in their role as law-makers (legislators).
The understanding (not definition) of such concepts as responsibility, liberty, authority, scientific knowledge, justice, right/wrong, etc. is a necessary prerequisite for answering some crucial questions about the regulation of social conduct and the conflicts derived from it:
– What are the principles and standards we should agree upon so that social life can unfold harmoniously on both local and planetary levels?
– Why are these principles and standards valid?
– What does each individual owe to the other individuals with whom he shares the social praxis?
– What is it that I, as an individual who interacts socially, can believe, or say or do?
– Which social ills could law attempt to lessen?
– How could this be achieved?
– For which social ills is each individual responsible and to what degree?
– Why am I responsible for the social consequences of my conduct?
At the end of the twentieth century we are forced to recognize:
– That law is in itself a culturally specific discursive form.
– That there is no pre-existent uniformity of values that explains a culture; there is cultural heterogeneity and multiplicity. Consequently,
– The authority of law based on a metanorm hierarchically superior to and underlying positive law, or on a social purpose legitimated by one culture only, has become increasingly problematic.
English law divides principally into two categories - criminal or public and civil or private. Criminal law concerns matters deemed by society to be so serious that in the event of a person transgressing a legal rule it is society itself which must punish the wrong-doer.
Civil law is concerned with disputes between individuals or indeed groups of individuals such as public companies and corporations. Society will lay down the framework of legal rules within which such disputes must be settled. But society itself is not a party to any legal proceedings; it acts more as a referee. Indeed the object of civil law is to compensate the injured party, rather than to punish the 'wrong-doer'. One individual sues another.
All that appears to imply that in terms of society's morality and values civil matters are less serious or less weighty than criminal issues.
It is possible to speak in terms of three branches of the law, the third being constitutional and administrative law. This area of legal rules covers such matters as the powers of Parliament and the Government, the powers of the police and the administration of justice, personal freedoms including race relations and immigration, and the freedoms of expression and assembly. The greater part of such administrative law will fall under civil law in the broadest sense and the rest under criminal law. Other countries take a different approach, however.
Law, far from being a complete and static system, is a dynamic system continually being created and modified. This condition of dynamism is already a commonplace in legal theory.
The law does not stand still. The public's attitudes and habits do change, human nature being an odd mixture of both the rational and the irrational, of both conservatism and radicalism. The legal system - including judicial outlook - has to accommodate itself to such shifts in the climate of opinions. Nonetheless the law may move slowly: change, whether societal or legal, is not necessarily rapid.
Economics
The term economics was coined around 1870 and popularized by Alfred Marshall, as a substitute for the earlier term political economy which has been used through the 18th-19th centuries, with Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx as its main thinkers and which today is frequently referred to as the "classical" economic theory. Economic thought may be roughly divided into three phases: Premodern (Greek, Roman, Arab), Early modern (mercantilist, physiocrats) and Modern (since Adam Smith in the late 18th century). Systematic economic theory has been developed mainly since the birth of the modern era.
Economics has been recognized as a special area of study for over a century. The term Economics derived from the Greek words οίκω [okos], 'house', and νέμω [nemo], 'rules' hence it means household management. There is no unanimous consensus upon its definition. Various definitions describe different aspects of this social science. We may mention some of them. Economics is:
· the social science that studies the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited wants. This involves analyzing the production, distribution, trade and consumption of goods and services, and their management;
· the study of choice and decision-making in a world of limited resources;
· the science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth, and with the various related problems of labor, finance, taxation, etc.
· research on such factors as interest rates, gross national product, inflation, unemployment, and inventories, as tools to predict the direction of the economy.
Economics is said to be normative when it recommends one choice over another, or when a subjective value judgment is made. Conversely, economics is said to be positive when it tries objectively to predict and explain consequences of choices, given a set of assumptions and/or a set of observations.
Economics is the study of how society chooses to allocate its scarce resources to the production of goods and services in order to satisfy unlimited wants. Society makes two kinds of choices: economy-wide, or macro, choices and individual, or micro, choices. The prefixes macro and micro come from the Greek words meaning “large” and “small,” respectively. Reflecting the macro and micro perspectives, economics consists of two main branches: macroeconomics and microeconomics.
Microeconomics (literally, very small economics) is the study of the economic behaviour of individual consumers, firms, and industries and the distribution of production and income among them. It considers individuals both as suppliers of labour and capital and as the ultimate consumers of the final product. It analyzes firms both as suppliers of products and as consumers of labour and capital. It deals with individual agents, such as households and businesses,
Microeconomics seeks to analyze the market form or other types of mechanisms that establish relative prices amongst goods and services and/or allocates society's resources amongst their many alternative uses.
Macroeconomics considers the economy as a whole, in which case it considers aggregate supply and demand for money, capital and commodities. Aspects receiving particular attention in economics are resource allocation, production, distribution, trade, and competition. Economic logic is increasingly applied to any problem that involves choice under scarcity or determining economic value.
There appear to be three methods by which economic phenomena may be investigated. The first consists mainly in deductive analysis. Proceeding from a few simple premises based upon general observation a researcher makes broad generalizations. The second is the historical method, which seeks an understanding of existing institutions by tracing their evolutions from their origins in the past. The third is statistical induction, which endeavours, by the analysis of numerical data, to develop quantitative knowledge of economic phenomena. Anyway, it is now coming to be recognized that these methods are complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
A successful theory provides insights into the physical or social relationships it studies. Economic theories are developed to explain such important observable quantities as the production, prices and consumption of goods and services, the employment of workers, and levels of saving and investment.
Economic variables are quantities that can have more than one value. For example, the price of an item is an economic variable representing what we must give up in exchange for each unit of that item. Price is an economic variable because it can go up or down as changes occur in the economy. An economic theory of price seeks to determine the causes for changes in the price of an item.
An economic model is a simplified way of expressing how some sector of the economy functions. An economic model contains assumptions that establish relationships among economic variables. We use logic, graphs, or mathematics to determine the consequences of the assumptions. In this way we can use the model to make predictions about how a change in economic conditions results in changes in decisions affecting economic variables. Economists often use the term “model” as a synonym for theory.
Understanding History
The study of the past is called history. When we set out to study history, we are able to draw the people and events of ancient times closer to us. Studying the past allows us to “see” the faces of the famous and the nameless people who lived thousands of years before us. It helps us understand what their lives were like. We can see how our lives are similar to theirs and also how they are different. We can see how people of the distant past had to face some of the very same problems we face today. And we can appreciate connections that bind together people and all time periods and all areas of the world.
What can the past tell us about the problems of today? By studying the past, we can see how previous cultures dealt with similar problems. We can understand the effects of their actions, and we can make judgments about how our actions might affect the future.
In our multicultural world we must understand the history of other cultures in order to solve problems together. By studying the past we can see the roots of the present and we can better understand our world neighbours. Learning about the past gives us a framework for making decisions about the issues that wee face today. It also helps us understand how our actions will affect the people of tomorrow.
History has been called a conversation between the present and the past. People of the past communicate with people of today through the writing, artifacts and structures they leave behind.
Every generation sees the world differently. And because each generation and each individual looks at things from a new point of view, history is always open to different interpretations.
History also has been compared to a jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces of the puzzle have been lost forever. Pieces once considered lost have now been found. The available pieces can be fitted together in many ways. Each generation of historians tries to put together the available pieces of the puzzle and to interpret the picture that emerges. In doing so we hope to understand not only what happened in the past, but how it happened and why it happened.
History – record of the events of human societies. The earliest surviving historical records are the inscriptions denoting the achievements of Egyptian and Babylonian Kings. As a literary form historical writing or historiography began with the Greek Herodotus in the 5th century BC, who was first to pass beyond the limits of a purely national outlook. A generation later, Thucydides brought to history a strong sense of the political and military ambitions of his native Athens. His close account of the Peloponnesian War was continued by Xenophon. Later Greek history and Roman history tended toward rhetoric.
Medieval history was dominated by a religious philosophy sustained by the Christian church. English chroniclers of this period are Bede, William Malmesbury and Matthew Paris.
The Renaissance revived historical writing and the study of history both by restoring classical models and by creating the science of textual criticism.
A product of new secular spirit was Machiavelli’s History of Florence 1520-23. This critical approach continued into the 17th century. The 18th century Enlightenment disposed of the attempt to explain history in theological terms and an interpretive masterpiece was produced by Edward Gibbon.
An attempt to formulate historical method and a philosophy of history, that of the Italian Giovanni Vico, remained almost unknown until the 19th century Romanticism left its mark on 19th-century historical writing in the tendency to exalt the contribution of the individual “hero”, and in the introduction of a more colourful and dramatic style and treatment, variously illustrated in the works of the French historican Jules Michelet (1798-1874) and the British writers Carlyle and Macaulay.
During the 20th century the study of history has been revolutionized, partly through the contributions of other disciplines, such as the sciences and anthropology. The deciphering of the Egyptian and Babylonian inscriptions was of great importance. Researchers and archaeologists have traced developments in prehistory and have revealed forgotten civilizations such as that of Crete. Anthropological studies of primitive Society and religion, which began with James Frazer’s Golden Bough 1890, have attempted to analyse the bases of later forms of social organizations and belief. The changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying perception of economics as a science forced historians to turn their attention to economic questions.
Contemporary historians make a distinction between historical evidence or records, historical writing and historical method or approaches to the study of history. Contemporary historians make extensive use of statistics, population figures and primary records to justify historical arguments. Historians do not just collect facts, they examine the information they collect and then decide how to interpret it.