Law is a set of rules that a society or government develops to ensure peace and to deal with crime, business agreements, social relationships and many other matters. A person who demonstrates a knowledge of the law is often called a lawyer or a judge. A career in law is attractive to young people because it allows you to deal with issues of justice and morality, and gives you a chance to express your own views authoritatively.

Legal education is the process of learning laws, including their history and development, and how they work in different jurisdictions. Law studies differ between countries, but a common approach is to teach case law. Law students examine earlier court decisions and attempt to identify principles, analogies and statements of principle in them. Then they use these to try to predict how a future court will rule in a particular situation.

One debate in modern law is the extent to which law should incorporate morality. A utilitarian answer to this question came from John Austin, who defined law as “commands, backed by the threat of sanctions, from a sovereign to men as his political subjects”. Natural lawyers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Aquinas believed that law reflected innate moral standards. The modern world, with its military and policing power over the lives of ordinary citizens, poses special problems for accountability that earlier writers did not anticipate.