Law and Morality

Abstract

In defining law as norm, so far as it is the subject-matter of a specific legal science, it is marked off from nature, and legal science from natural science. But in addition to legal norms there are also others which regulate the mutual behaviour of men, namely social norms, and legal science is therefore not the only discipline concerned with the study and description of social norms. These other social norms can be collectively given the name of morality, and the discipline concerned with their study and description may be called ethics.¹ In so far as justice is a demand of morality, the relation between justice and law is included in the relation between morality and law. It should be noted here that in ordinary usage, just as law is confused with legal science, so morality is very often confounded with ethics, and things are said of the latter which apply only to the former: that it governs human behaviour, that it imposes duties and rights, i.e., that it lays down authoritative norms, whereas it can only study and describe the moral norms laid down by a moral authority or arisen out of custom. Now not only is the methodological purity of legal science endangered by failure to observe the boundary separating it from natural science; it is still further endangered by the fact that it is not divided, or not clearly enough divided, from ethics that no sharp distinction is made between law and morality.

Estudios Juridico-Sociales. Homenaje al Profesor Luiz Legaz y Lacambra, 1960, pp. 153–164.