Law is a set of rules created and enforced by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior. Its precise definition is a matter of longstanding debate.

The primary goal of law is to promote the well-being of society by ensuring that individuals have basic human rights and are treated fairly by government officials and private citizens. It also provides a way to resolve disputes peacefully without resorting to violence. For example, if two people claim the same piece of property, the courts can determine who owns it. This is a crucial function for all societies and helps prevent conflict and violence in our communities.

Another important function of law is to provide a system of justice for everyone in a country, regardless of their wealth or status. The law ensures that the police and other public authorities treat all people equally and with respect, even if they disagree about the interpretation of a specific statute. This is known as the rule of law and is fundamental to a stable democracy.

A law can be either written or unwritten, but most laws are written and codified in some form. Written law is usually called legislation and can be found in books, online or in law journals. Written laws are enforceable in a court of law and may be interpreted by judges using different methods of legal reasoning. These include syllogism, which is used in civil law systems, analogy, which is common in common law countries such as the US, and argumentative theories like golden rule and mischief theory.

There are many types of law, including criminal, family, corporate, administrative, and international. Each of these areas has its own laws and regulations. For example, employment law governs workplace relationships and regulations, tax law covers the amount of money a person must pay in taxes, and banking laws dictate rules about how much capital a bank must hold before it can lend money to other banks or businesses.

In the United States, the Constitution divides power between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the federal government. This framework, called separation of powers, ensures that no one person can gain absolute power and stand above the law. In other countries, the constitutions of individual states have similar structures to protect citizens from abusive governments.

Aside from its formal definition, a law can be defined as the collective narrative that society tells about equal justice for all. This narrative is not necessarily binding, but it provides a framework for understanding how much of the law is actually obeyed. It is possible to make better predictions about how the law will be interpreted and applied by observing the intersection of an individual’s personal narrative with the communal narrative of the law. The difference between these two is a measure of the binding nature of the law. This measurement is known as experience and is Holmes’s building block for constructing law.