THE NATURE OF LAW

To a great extent, business activity across the world is carried on within a capitalist, market-based system. With regard to such a system, law provides and maintains an essential framework within which such business activity can take place, and without which it could not operate. In maintaining this framework, law establishes the rules and procedures for what is to be considered legitimate business activity and, as a corollary, what is not legitimate. It is essential, therefore, for the businessperson to be aware of the nature of the legal framework within which they have to operate. Even if they employ legal experts to deal with their legal problems, they will still need to be sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to recognise when to refer matters to those experts. It is the intention of this textbook to provide business students with an understanding of the most important aspects of law as they impinge on various aspects of business activity. One of the most obvious and most central characteristics of all societies is that they must possess some degree of order, in order to permit their members to interact over a sustained period of time. Different societies, however, have different forms of order. Some societies are highly regimented with strictly enforced social rules, whereas others continue to function in what outsiders might consider a very unstructured manner, with apparently few strict rules being enforced.Order is, therefore, necessary, but the form through which order is maintained is certainly not universal, as many anthropological studies have show  In our society, law plays an important part in the creation and maintenance of social order. We must be aware, however, that law as we know it is not the only means of creating order. Even in our society, order is not solely dependent on law, but also involves questions of a more general moral and political character. This book is not concerned with providing a general explanation of the form of order. It is concerned, more particularly, with describing and explaining the key institutional aspects of that particular form of order that is legal order.  The most obvious way in which law contributes to the maintenance of social order is the way in which it deals with disorder or conflict. This book, therefore, is particularly concerned with the institutions and procedures, both civil and criminal, through which law operates to ensure a particular form of social order by dealing with various conflicts when they arise. Law is a formal mechanism of social control and, as such, it is essential that the student of law is fully aware of the nature of that formal structure. There are, however, other aspects to law that are less immediately apparent but of no less importance, such as the inescapably political nature of law. Some textbooks focus more on this particular aspect of law than others and these differences become evident in the particular approach adopted by the authors. The approach favoured by the authors of this book is to recognise that studying English law is not just about learning legal rules; it is also about considering a social institution of fundamental importance.