Law is the system of state-enforced rules by which relatively large civil societies and political entities operate. This programmed social functioning is backed up by the exercise of power by a politically sovereign body.
　　1) What constitutes law among the behavioral codes by which groups or individuals in society live has been defined by legal philosophers in three different ways.Some say that law is the command of a sovereign power to obey a rule, with a penalty for violating it. This view is called legal positivism and has been particularly associated with the 19th-century English philosopher John Austin.
　　2)On the other side are those who say that law is the application within a state or any other community of rules that are derived from universal principles of morality rooted in turn in revealed religion or reason or a kind of ethical communal sensibility. This view is associated with Thomas Aquinas, in the Middle Ages, who proposed it in the form of natural law theory, and with Lon Fuller and Ronald Dworkin, among recent American legal philosophers.
　　In the 1960s the widely respected Oxford philosopher H.L.A. Hart tried to find an intermediate position between these two opposing definitions of law according to positivism and natural law.3) He argued that there are “rules of recognition” in which the obligation of rule conformity is brought, about by “social pressure” and customary social behavior rather than by sovereign command and penalty.
　　Many stipulations, Hart claimed, are recognizable as laws that are pragmatic rules for transactions between private parties and functionally lie outside the sphere of sovereign command and penalty. No sovereign power, no matter how ambitious and aggressive, can enforce more than part of the range of laws we live .by. Even the concept of sovereign power is problematic and vulnerable.
　　4)Whether Hart really established an intermediate position between the two standard positions in legal philosophy or simply found a new way-subtle, perhaps, or confusing—of associating law with ethics in a context of linguistic anal)sis and pragmatic theory remains a matter of dispute.
　　Law is divided into two kinds. First, there is criminal law, by which peace and security are maintained, and whose violation results in publicly administered punishment of greater or lesser severity and brings upon the violator the bad name of moral turpitude.5)Second, there is civil law, which regulates relationships between individuals, families, and corporations involving other than criminal activities and provides state-enforced techniques for accumulating and distributing property and other forms of wealth. For example, murder and robbery fall within the scope of criminal law. Contracts, personal liability, and marriage and divorce are within the scope of civil law.