LAWS 1000 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Reproductive Rights, Ruling Class, Rectify
Document Summary
Natural law: humanities universal laws, which go above and beyond mankind. Advantage: is moral, and provides criteria to challenge the law. Historical and evolutionary interpretations of law that consider the legal and moral to constitute two quite separate realms. Promotes the calculability and predictability of social relations. Disadvantage: allows for immoral, racist, and sexist laws. Societies are split into owning class and the working class [bourgeoisie and proletariat]. Advantage: recognizes that there is inequality in communities. Disadvantage: only recognizes economic inequality, and uses law as a method of maintaining the inequality. Legal realism: judges make the law, rather than find it. Law is what the judges say it is. The idea that we cannot understand the law without knowing where it comes from. Not interested in the validity of the law. Goal is to point out weaknesses of positive certainty. Advantage: non idealized, creates a connection between law and politics.
