What is law?

I haven't written a blog post since I arrived at university so I decided to post the preparation I had to do for my first seminar last week. For those of you who don't know/haven't been stalking me well enough (come on guys) I have moved from home to go to the University of Nottingham and am studying law.

For our first seminar (it's been entirely lectures up to this point) in 'understanding law' we were asked to buy a copy of the previous day's Guardian and read through it, making notes and picking out articles which relate to 'our definition of law'. I hadn't really thought about my definition of law before now, which was totally the point of the exercise. Not many people do think about it. It's such an inherently self-explanatory concept, almost: law is 'law'.

But once I'd thought about it a bit more and wrote this up, I decided that I wholeheartedly agree with what I wrote. My definition was a bit different from everyone else's and if there was a prize for 'student who's most likely to be studying the wrong subject' after the seminar, then I would have undoubtedly won. But at the same point I think my seminar leader was impressed by my definition, if only because it was less generic and more thought out than most.

"Law is the human application of the metaphysical concept of justice; it is the anthropic ruling of the line between perceived ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, pertaining to social and natural moralities. It is society’s interpretation of justice, stretching its inner fibres as far as the collective human eye can decipher. Law is society’s most thorough attempt at delivering the grey in between the black and white of mankind’s ethical codes; acknowledging the division between what is allowable and what is not before affirming this for the rest of society through parliament or the courts. Law is justice without its conceptual case; interpreted into human hands to create a device for order and authority within a population."

Law is fallible. It's complex; it's long-winded. And this is because it's a human application. My definition is very Platonic. I was talking to someone about my definition before seminar and they were all for going all Aristotle on it, rather than Plato. Like I'd ever do that, the Plato-lover I am. But justice is a concept, and law is the human interpretation of it. We're taking a concept from the world of the forms and it's disintegrating with every second it's spending here. It's a shadow of its real self in this material, moving world. It's eroding away in Heraclitus' river.

And for me, that is law. Law is an inherently human thing. It's a translation of justice, almost. Law is putting justice into Google translate and having to assume the answer it gives out is right. It's never perfect; it never will be. We're humans and whenever there is human involvement something is entirely fallible. Only in concept can things be perfect; pure. The downfall of law is that it's human. It will never be the perfect, imposing body it seems to present itself as by definition as a result. Many people treat law as an organic, natural super-entity, but it's not. Justice is. Justice is everlasting and ever-present in this world whether humans are here to put it into application or not. But when it's put into application, it's interpreted as law.

So that's what I think law is. It's one of those things that I didn't necessarily believe entirely when I wrote it; it sort of just flowed out when I was desperately thinking about what to write, pretentiously and overbearingly flowery (the irony of that sentence is not lost on me, don't worry). But now I've read my own words over and over, I believe it more. I believe it entirely. That is what I think law is.

Yours,

a law student.