Hello and welcome back to Law 101 from the Barn. Today we're not going to get into the Constitution. I wanted to start by talking about the law in a broad sense, in a lesson that I'm calling a legal primer.
Now the reason for this is that I think it's actually quite important that I lay bare my own presuppositions, my own biases, my own perspectives that will actually inform how I talk about and how I approach the law. And I think that one of the great benefits of this course for all of you is that you will get a variety of perspectives. And many of my colleagues and I agree on a variety of things, but we also disagree on things. We disagree on emphasis, or we disagree on what the actual proper test might be for a particular issue, or perhaps we disagree on an underlying concept.
And so it's actually really, really important that we talk about how we view the law because that might have an influence or an impact on how we teach the law. But also, I know you've had a few lessons already and some discussions and some basics, but we're about to jump into what the Constitution is and how it operates without having really had much of a discussion about how we think about the law. This is meant just as a quick discussion. This will not be in the exam or in the quizzes. This is instead meant to give you the footing you need to move forward and be effective in this class with understanding what the law is.
And so there's a fundamental question here. What is law? What is law and how does it actually inform or influence society?
And there are a variety of perspectives that could be taken here, but at its most basic, at its most fundamental, we can talk about law as being a framework. or blueprint. Now I like this idea because I like blueprints. So I've often shown this picture.
This is a picture of a Barcelona chair. It's a very iconic chair that I've always liked. And this is a blueprint that provides the structure. It tells you the dimensions.
It tells you some of the various parts. And it's a very simple blueprint here. It doesn't give you all of the information that you would need to build this chair, but it gives you some basic dimensions. And And that's the same with law. Law becomes something that provides a framework for how we operate within society.
Sometimes it's sparse and it just gives a basic idea of the dimensions. And other times, as there will be with other blueprints, a far more detailed exploration of what's to come. Now, I have in the house behind the barn here a set of blueprints because my partner and I are currently renovating. We're putting on an addition on the back and I thought about bringing them out. But.
The reality is one day it rained and rain got under the tarp and my blueprints got wrecked a bit. So they're not very easy to handle now. But I wanted to show you blueprints because this is actually what is setting out the structure of the addition. How we are building this addition is dictated by what's on the page.
There's information about the width of the house, the height, the sizes of the windows, the types of beams that are required, where lights are going to go, how HVAC, which is like your heating and cooling, is going to go, where... plumbing is going to go and all of those details on the blueprint get translated in real life in the building as it's structured and built up. And the same happens with law.
Law sets a framework or blueprint for human interaction and what it ends up doing is it actually sets standards for how we operate. You can think about some very basic fundamental activities that we engage in. So We're not driving to classes right now, you're at home, but if you're on the highway, you're on the roadway, we stay to the right. There's a standard that's been set by law. This is not a requirement, there's no necessary reason why we drive on the right per se, it's just that we have standards that have set that we drive on the right.
Now, there are cars in Canada that have the steering wheel on the wrong side because they've been imported, so it's not about where the location of the steering wheel is. And lots of people have grown up driving in different environments, so it's not just about experience. It's about the standard that says, this is what we expect of you.
And we go through a ton of examples just using driving, what stop signs mean, what traffic lights mean, what indicators are used for when you're changing lanes. And sometimes we don't have a good understanding of how these standards work. And I think about roundabouts.
Where I live in the region of Waterloo, there are a number of roundabouts. And these roundabouts are not actually used very well. People don't understand.
And part of that's because they don't know all the standards. The rules haven't been communicated as well as they should have been, perhaps. Standards are there. They're just not necessarily understood or known. And so that's one of the things about the law that's really important.
The law sets the standards, but it doesn't actually mean that individuals are aware of them. The law does more than just set standards. It's actually going to regulate our behavior.
How we interact with one another will be regulated in a large way by the law. Now, of course, there's more than the law that's regulating our behaviors. Think of your interactions with your friends.
Many of your interactions with your cohort, with your friends and peers, will be guided by social norms and cultural norms. They're going to be guided by what you expect out of a friendship. That's not law per se. But there's also a whole bunch of things in how we interact that actually are regulated by law. So, for example, if your friend just hauled off and hit you, you would say, hey, you can't do that.
You're not allowed to hit me. And that's because there's standards about How we interact, how we use our body, how we use our own physicality in relation to others. And so law actually ends up regulating the behaviors between us.
It does that in far more profound ways as well. It does that in how we are regulated through our contracts, the kinds of agreements that we make. It regulates us in how we use our property, how we use our intellectual property, and so forth.
So the law is there to regulate the behaviors of individuals within society. And what that ends up doing is that now we have standards in place that are there to guide and inform our behavior. And the reason for that is there's a certain degree of predictability and reliability and a bunch of other reasons that we'll be talking about in my modules, but also beyond, about why it's important that the law sets these standards. Now, historically, when I was trained in law school many years ago, One of my profs said, law is really about three Ps. And there's a certain degree to which this is obviously a simplification.
The three Ps that he talked about were, first off, the law is about persons. The law regulates persons. And later in the term, you're going to talk about this in the context of Torah.
At least this is what I was taught by one of my former profs. The other thing that law does is it regulates property. It regulates how we use the things that we have ownership over, whether it's real property, things like land and things like the barn that are attached to land, or other types of property.
For example, this lecture is my intellectual property. So law has some rules that set expectations of what can happen with this particular lecture, because this is actually my property. Similarly, you know, your laptop is your laptop, and there's rules around how others can interact or use or not use that property.
And the third is with promises. The third P was promises. Now, this is often a very fun lecture, I think, and I wish I could teach contracts often because I find it a very fun topic to talk about. But the idea of promises being contracts, the kinds of agreements we get into with one another that are legally enforceable.
And there's all sorts of promises that are not legally enforceable. But many of the promises we get into are. We say, I will give you X if you give me Y. And there's all sorts of rules that govern how that type of relationship is seen.
Now, this is typically thought of as being on one side of the legal spectrum, which is known as private law. Now, I'm not going to go into a full taxonomy of the law, but we typically have two types of law, big baskets of public law, the thing about the state and the government and how the state regulates its citizens, and private law. the interactions between private individuals.
This is often thought to be on the private law side, but it gets confusing because the state, the government, does have rules and does enact legislation that informs this area. So there is a lot of intertwined kind of aspects. I only bring up the three Ps to kind of give you an example of the types of things that law is regulating or setting standards around.
So setting standards around how we use our person, how we use our property. types of promises. I also like to talk about a fourth P that is not always addressed. And if we were in person, I'd try to get you to think of a few different possibilities, but we can't. So I'll just tell you, and that is population.
Now, this goes back to my public health law perspective that I've mentioned in our opening introductory lecture, that I work in public health law, and I think law actually does set standards and regulates behavior with an interest towards populations. There's an ancient legal saying called salut populi supremo lex. The health of the people is the highest law.
And not everyone thinks that's the entire interpretation. Some interpret it as the welfare of the people or the wealth of the people. But the health of the people, even the well-being of the people as being the highest law, is an idea that actually we don't really have much anymore in our current understanding. We don't think often about populations.
Part of my research and part of my aim in my own kind of... scholarly endeavors is to increase the amount of time we spend talking about the role of law in regulating populations and providing opportunities for populations. to be governed through law with an aim towards ensuring that that population is healthy. That's my own hobby horse, of course, but we can see even with these four examples how law might actually interact with and regulate individuals and populations.
And part of that is to set standards that we can have reliable, kind of consistent responses to, that we can expect the same outcomes. There are legitimate reasons why we want to have consistency, and we talk about this in our next lecture when we get into the rule of law. Now, when we talk about what law is, so far we've talked about what law kind of does, and that is that it's regulating behaviors and setting standards. But where does law come from?
How do we actually get to law? There are a variety of philosophical perspectives. And I'm not sure if you can read all these fonts, so I will make sure that I change to make them brighter.
I'm realizing that I can't tell how obvious these are, and I'll try and adjust and tweak this as we go. But there's a variety of philosophical basis for law that can be used to give law its meaning. And so I'm going to talk about three here in particular. I'm going to talk about natural law, legal positivism, and legal realism.
Now, to be sure, there are far more.