types of law

LAW in general means any rule of action and includes any standard or pattern to which actions are or ought to be confirmed. In its judicial sense, ‘law’ means a body of rules of conduct, action or behavior of persons, made and enforced by the State. It expresses a rule of human action. In the present age law pervades all the spheres of human activities and the State seeks to regulate them through the instrumentality of law. The law therefore, has to play a positive role in regulating human conduct.
The modern jurists have defined law as a means to secure legal justice. They have defined law from different angles. Some have defined it on the basis of its nature, some concentrate mainly on its sources. Again, some writers define law in terms of its effect on society while others prefer to define it in terms of ends or purpose of law. There is no single definition of law can be treated as satisfactory because law is ever changing in the dynamic fabric of its inherent element. All developments in law follow certain sequence. It is for this reason that Thurman Arnold observed, “law is ultimately a set of positive prescribed formal rules enforced by the sovereign authority with the approval of common public opinion in response to social challenge emanating from contemporaneous factors and currency of forces.”

A law, in the proper sense of the term, is a general rule of human action, taking cognizance only of external acts, enforced by a determinate sovereign authority, which is human, and, which is paramount in a political society. Thus briefly stated, law may be defined as a general rule of external human action enforced by a sovereign political authority. All other rules of guidance of human action are called laws merely by analogy which Holland calls as “laws so-called.”
Law may be described as a normative science, that is, a science which lays down norms and standards for human behavior in a specified situation or situation enforceable through the sanction of the state. What distinguishes law from other social sciences is its normative character. This fact along with the fact that stability and certainty of law are desirable goals and social values to be pursued, make law to be a primary concern for the legal fraternity. The function of law is that of social engineering and this perception has been accepted by all the civilized countries of the world including India. The concern of law as an instrument of enhancing economic and social justice has widened to such an extent that there has been growth of a variety f laws touching various facets of human life. A significant development in this process has been that besides the legislative enactments the laws made by the executive in exercise of it s delegated power to legislate have grown much more, both in quantity and quality.
Though law functions to regulate the conduct of men in society, its extent of operation has to be restricted to some extent for ensuring certainty and stability in the legal system