Law serves a variety of purposes in a nation, including (1) keeping the peace; (2) maintaining the status quo; (3) preserving individual rights; (4) protecting minorities against majorities; (5) promoting social justice; and (6) providing for orderly social change. Some legal systems serve these functions better than others.

Normatively speaking, the common concept of law is an institutional system of norms that is oriented towards action-guiding and towards aspects of human behavior that can be adjudicated (Raz 1979: 103-121; 1994: 255-259). It is characterized by a practical orientation and institutional features less dominant in non-institutional rights.

Legal rights are often thought to reflect natural rights, that is, moral values not dependent on enforcement, recognition, or social convention. However, such views have increasingly been criticized as insufficiently normative and deontological.

The moral justification of some legal rights is also sometimes questioned, particularly if those rights protect self-serving interests such as the self-interested and predatory actions of slumlords. Those interests, as a matter of principle, cannot justify certain legal rights that secure the interests of others or the general welfare or public order.

A more accurate account of rights’ preemptory quality is likely not in terms of “trumping” but as setting normative “thresholds,” excluding many, yet rarely all possible conflicting considerations (Lyons 1994: 152; Griffin 2008: 76). Thus, while not all rights are peremptory, they do tend to be very stringent (Raz 1995: 31-32). These right’s stringency is a function of the scope of conflicting reasons that the right trumps or excludes, and of how demanding are the duties grounded in the right.