Law

The Hammurabi Code is one of the first sets of laws that have been found and one of the best preserved examples of this type of document of the former Mesopotamia.

Statute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, written in Polish.

The law (in Latin, lex, legis) is a legal rule issued by the legislator, that is, a precept established by the authority competent, in which something is commanded or prohibited in accordance with justice, non-compliance with which leads to a sanction. According to the Panamanian jurist César Quintero, the law is a "rule issued by a public authority that orders, prohibits or allows everyone, and to which everyone must obey." On the other hand, the Venezuelan jurist Andrés Bello defined the law as "a declaration of the sovereign will that, manifested in the manner prescribed by the Constitution, commands, prohibits or allows." For Bello, what is decisive in qualifying an act of law is the way in which it is developed and not the nature of the provision contained in it. In general, laws are norms that regulate the social coexistence of a nation.

Considerations

Laws are delimiters of the free will of people within society. It can be said that the law is the external control that exists for human conduct, the norms that govern our social conduct. It constitutes one of the main sources of law.^{[citation required]}

Historical definitions

• Aristotle: The common consent of the city.
• Gay: It is what the people command and establish.
• Aftalion: It is the general rule established by the word of the competent body (legislator).
• Kelsen: Specifically, legislation means the establishment of general legal norms, whatever the body does.
• Planiol: Mandatory social rule established on a permanent basis by public authority and sanctioned by force.
• St. Thomas Aquinas: Ordination of the reason for the common good and solemnly promulgated by those who care for the community.

Features

• Generality: the law includes all those who are in the conditions provided by it, without exceptions of any kind.
• Obligatoriedad: it is imperative-attributive, which on the one hand establishes legal obligations or duties and on the other grants rights. The law imposes its mandates, even against the will of its recipients. Its non-compliance leads to a sanction, to a punishment imposed by itself.
• Permanence: they are dictated indefinitely, permanently, for an undetermined number of cases and facts, and will only cease to be effective through their abrogation, subrogation and derogation by subsequent laws.
• Abstract and impersonal: laws are not issued to regulate or resolve individual cases, or for individuals or groups, their impersonality and abstraction lead them to generality.
• Ignorance is no excuse: no one can invoke his ignorance or ignorance to stop fulfilling it.
• Irretroactive: as a general rule, it regulates the facts that occur from its publication, to the future, never to the past, except for certain exceptions (such as retroactivity in criminal matters).

Natural law

Natural laws are enunciative judgments whose purpose is to show the indefectible relationships that exist in nature, which is dictated by the correct reason. Thomas Hobbes differs between reason and passion as objects of the natural law of man in which reason guarantees the search for peace, the renunciation of my positive rights (in pursuit of obtaining security and life) and compliance with agreements (voluntary, unique and rational). On the other hand, the passion awakens by sensations and natural needs of man, such as the fear of death. It is born from human instinct itself and does not make a pact possible, since man is left like a dissatisfied animal, always wanting more and more to improve.

Therefore, it must be concluded that reason will always be above passion, since it allows us to think before acting. Passion only serves to teach us something that neither modernity, nor the passage of time, nor pacts or contracts or concepts of justice and injustice can teach us: to survive at all costs. The statesman or the one who is learning to govern must understand that men have the capacity for reason, they are normally fickle and fall easily to the waste of passions, and this can be beneficial for him, since he can learn to develop a mandate. where you can control others. From his hopes and dreams, his fears and his joys. As I have already said, all men have the gift of reasoning, but they always fall into the trap because the vast majority are not magnanimous, but pusillanimous and weak.^{[citation required]}

Positive Law

In Law, the origin of the definition of the law is due to Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae when he conceived it as: «The arrangement of reason directed to the common good and promulgated by which He is in charge of caring for the community.

More modernly, the rule of highest rank after the Constitution that emanates from whoever holds the legislative power is called law. As long as it is not approved, it is a bill.

Classifications of laws

• In a material and formal sense: this diversification in material and formal is particular for observing the content of the law and its structure.
  • Material. Refers to what is the content of the norm (their purpose, the rule of conduct it establishes and the powers and duties it grants and imposes).
  • Formal. Refers to how the structure of the rule should be (all rule must be general, compulsory, written, emanated from the competent congress or authority under the constitutionally determined mechanism and must be part of the law of a State).

• In strict and equitable law, they are also called rigid or flexible. In the first the rule is taxative and leaves no room to appreciate the circumstances of the case or to graduate its consequences. In the latter, the requirements or effects of the regulated case are more or less undetermined, leaving a certain margin to appreciate the factual circumstances and to give the Law a proper configuration to the specific case.

a) By the system to which they belong: international; nationals; provincial; local.

b) Depending on the mode of operation:

• Permissive: these are those provisions that authorize, allow a subject to perform certain behaviors.
• Prohibitive: they are those who vegan, deny the subject the possibility of performing certain acts or having certain behaviors.
• Declaratives: they are those whose content contains definitions. "All entities are capable of acquiring rights and contracting obligations."

c) According to how the individual will acts:

• Imperative: they are laws that are imposed on individual or collective will, which give no choice for the subject.
• Supplements: they are laws that govern only when people do not express their will in another sense. They are closely linked to the principle of autonomy of will.

Some types of laws are:

1. It is the fundamental law that establishes principles for which a country ' s legislation should be governed; it is usually called the Constitution. The Constitution is the supreme rule of the legal system, since it is above any law.
2. Organic law when born as a result of a constitutional mandate for the regulation of a specific matter.
3. Regular law, including budget law.

Delegated legislation

They are legal norms with the force of law issued by the Government on certain matters. They are not properly laws, although they have all the effects of these, since they have value, rank and force of law. Among them we find:

• Decree Law (Spain and in emergency regimes)
• Legislative Decree
• Decree with force of law (Chile)
• Decree on Necessity and Emergency (Argentina)