Subject: Law
Topic: What makes Law valid? / Should the law be underpinned by social, moral and economic values?
Although they vary from state to state, every country has rules, norms, values, beliefs, and, most importantly, laws. The ‘Oxford Dictionary of Law’ defines law as, ‘The enforceable body of rules that govern any society’. Just as the beliefs, values and norms, in order for law to be existent and functional in any society, there must be a social institution, through which the law established, used and developed, or else the concept of law would be a ‘pie in the sky’ theory. This institution would be the legal system. As defined by Rose-Marie Belle Antoine in ‘Commonwealth Caribbean Law and Legal Systems’, a legal system is ‘the sum of legal rules, legal institutions and machinery which operate within the particular country or jurisdiction’. The Caribbean Country of Grenada is no exception the principles afore-outlined. This essay will seek to answer the question of whether or not the law should be underpinned by social, moral and economic values. This would be accomplished by indicating whether or not the social, moral and economic values are underpinned in the most important legal sources of law in Grenada and by examining the two schools of thought which seek to answer the question of whether or not the law should be underpinned by social, moral and economic values.
There exist certain principles that must be properly defined in order to gauge a deeper understanding of the topic at hand. These are social values, moral values and economic values. Perhaps, given the complex nature of the aforementioned terms, it may be best to define the term ‘values’, then coin the term to find the social, moral and economic senses of the word. That being noted, Young and Mack in ‘Sociology and Social Life’ opine, ‘Values are assumptions, largely unconscious, of what is right.’ If social means, ‘of or relating to society or its