The study of Law encompasses a wide range of legal disciplines. For example, labour law examines the tripartite industrial relationship between worker, employer and trade union; criminal law studies a country’s justice system; family law is concerned with marriage and divorce; commercial law is about contracts; property laws cover rights in land, whether real or personal (such as ownership of computers, cars and jewellery); and forensic science is about which materials can be used to build up a case in court.

In addition to its coercive aspects and sanctions-imposing functions, law serves a variety of other functions in our society, such as establishing norms of desirable behavior, proclaiming symbolic expressions of communal values, or resolving disputes about facts. It is these other functions that primarily drive debates about what law actually is.

For example, a reductionist account of law’s normativity suggests that it simply consists in the fact that subjects desire to avoid sanction, but this argument has been fiercely criticized by H.L.A Hart. Other critics have suggested that law’s normative aspect is primarily the fact that it gives us reasons to follow its rules.

A further debate about the nature of law concerns how far law is a distinct entity from other normative domains in our culture, such as morality, religion and social conventions like etiquette, which also guide human behaviour in many ways which are similar to those served by the law. This debate is relevant for understanding how the functions of the law interact with other normative domains, and how the laws we create can be improved.