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Law Notes Legal Foundations (LAWS110) Notes

An Unjust Law Is Not A Law At All Essay

Updated An Unjust Law Is Not A Law At All Essay Notes

Legal Foundations (LAWS110) Notes

Legal Foundations (LAWS110)

Approximately 168 pages

The notes are from lectures and tutorials for legal foundations from a high achieving student from the lecturer John Hopkins and Sasha.

The course aims to provide a foundation in the skills of legal research and legal writing together with an academic grounding in topics fundamental to the New Zealand legal system. The course will involve training by way of proactive exercises in legal research and legal writing. It will also examine the historical development of New Zealand's legal system, f...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Legal Foundations (LAWS110) Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

An unjust law is not a law at all

500 words

2-3 paragraphs (150-250 words)

Natural law

Law as authority
Moral view point

Compliance with the law is demanded

As long as society accepts this, it is a law-

The concept of law is important to understand

Layout

Intro- my argument- support

  • Form vs function

  • Positivism vs natural law theory

Conclude

Significantly a set of rules in order to be seen and classed as a law need to have a particular degree of moral standard. This is because unlike the positivism perspective, law is not solely a system of rules that performs a particular function.

Believe the natural law theory that law is a set of legitimate rules that must be morally legitimate. This is because the essence of law follows the idea that morality is interlinked with law and it is of significant importance

This is because law should be seen as morally justified for society to follow it. Significantly, without this moral legitimacy to law then it is just seen as a “meaningless concept and as the rules of the powerful”.

This is because the purpose and the function of law must be taken into account not just the form. This is because law is in place to regulate society’s behaviour. Since law must be “just” then an unjust law is not a law.

As a long as a large portion of society of society view it as unjust then it is not a law.

Law as a moral judgement.

Hart- structure of rules, The Concept of Law 1961 which focuses on law as a system of rules with a formal structure. This would argue that a law is a law. However, this does not take into account the moral legitimacy which is at the essence of law which make a...

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