Oral Law in Jurisprudence
From a legal point of view, an oral law can be:
- a habit, or custom with legal relevance or when the formal law expressly refers to it (but in this latter case, it is properly an indirect source of legal rights and obligations);
- a spoken command or order that has to be respected as a law (in most modern western legal systems, some dispositions can be issued by word in given cases of emergency).
An oral law, intended as a body of rules, can be admitted in jurisprudence as long as it shows some efficacy, therefore it needs that the law is public, the human action is evaluated by a judge (ordinarily producing a sentence according to the general interpretation of the law) and then a punishment has eventually to be put into effect. Some oral laws provide all these elements (for instance, some codes of conduct in use among criminal associations like mafia do have a well known law, a judge, a condemnation), while others usually miss some of them.
Read more about this topic: Oral Law
Famous quotes containing the words oral and/or law:
“We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write, on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Faith, I have been a truant in the law,
And never yet could frame my will to it,
And therefore frame the law unto my will.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)