Chapter 1 Law: Its Function and Purpose

There are all sorts of ways that the "law" can be defined as, it's just a matter of who defines it. It is defined in the book that law is a written body of general rules of conduct that apply to everybody in a community, society, or culture. Again, most people would just say that law means, a rule that we go by and if we disobey the law, we get punished for it. It's just a matter of following rules and guidelines. Well what does that mean? It means that that in order to maintain a certain way of life, we have things we just do because we establish things from being right or wrong. Following a guideline means there is a certain way of doing something, so we just do it. Following the rules means we obey the criteria by what we told or by things that we have read. Law is simply trying to bind or to join everyone together in a sense that we have an organized and structured way of life. If we had no rules or regulations, everybody would be running around like wild animals. There would be things like crimes happening and murder's happening and there wouldn't be anyone to catch the criminals or murderers because without the law, there are no rules in a society and therefore people could just get away with things.

There are 6 characteristics that we associate culture and the relationship to law:

Beliefs
Values
Norms
Symbols
Technology
Language

In our culture we have certain beliefs that are ideas we have about numerous things. For example some people are Christian/Catholic and some people are Buddhist. It all depends on our own personal ideas. There are certain values that we have in our culture saying that things are bad or good, wrong or right, etc., some people don't share the same value, it is all opinionated but the main difference between value and beliefs are that a value is more specified than a belief is. We have norms in our culture that we classify as being what is expected from people and they are compatible with our beliefs and values. We have certain symbols in our culture that represent something in a way that signify something. For example sometimes in restaurants you will see a sign that has a cigarette and a line through it, it is symbolizing the fact that it is a non-smoking restaurant. Technology in our culture today has grew immensely over a short period of time. Now we have technologies that are able to detect DNA matches. We didn't used to have the technology for that back in the day. Without technology we wouldn't have the ability to do certain things accurately. Last but not least is language, we have a language that we use in our society that allows us to communicate with others. We have certain body language we use when we can't talk like a head nod or a wave.
Over centuries we have obtained certain aspects from philosopher's like John Locke, Hobbes, Plato, Aristotle, Max Weber, and Durkheim. Each one of these had different views on law and how it was pertained with our culture. Locke was all about how nature is inferior to the political state because it lacked law. He saw that humans were "blank slates" when we are born and that our actions from past experiences will result in present situations. Hobbes on the other hand believed that life is nasty, brutish and short. For the most part people will believe what they want to believe and it doesn't matter if a philosopher stated it. In our culture we do what we see and sometimes people will do things they wouldn't necessarily want to do, but conformity is something that happens in a society.