Variant I.

Task 1. Read and translate the text

The Question of Law

Jurisprudence* is the philosophy of law, or the science which deals with positive law and legal relations. The study of jurisprudence asks questions such as: What is law? Where does it come from? Why do we have it? When do we first meet it? Where have you met it? In my opinion, no nation that does not have an informed populace in jurispru­dence can be strong and free.

Fundamentally, law may be called rules governing behavior between people.

Purposes for law include: to regulate human relations; to determine ownership/control of property; to fix parameters of freedom in community and relationships by restraining anarchy (for without law there is only anarchy); to produce justice. But so long as we agree and live out our agreements, we do not need written law. But when we disagree, we must have a system designed to restore us to agreement or decide be­tween us so we do not fall into blood feuds. To have a system we must recognize need for a Rule of Law*.

But who decides what is or is not justice? A legislature* passing laws? Public opinion directing legislators? Judges? Juries? Money? Lawyers? Yes, but No - each individual will decide, inside him, when in conflict, whether he will accept the outcome as justice or not.

Law can be spoken of in many different ways: Political*, Criminal, Civil, and Equitable*, or Constitutional, Statutory* and Procedural*. Or case precedent (stare decisis*) or local custom (tradition); or in a vertical manner - international, then national, then district, then city, etc.; or re­pressive, democratic, autonomous, common, etc. Yet all law will, at times, seem arbitrary and capricious. That is because people make the decisions, not the law - the law is not self-acting. Rule of Law asks the question: "Are these decisions of people made in a framework of law, or a framework of no law?"

The problem always was, and is: What is an adequate base for law? What is adequate so that a human desire for freedom can exist without anarchy and yet be gentle enough to provide a form that will not become arbitrary tyranny?

Jurisprudence has to do with administration, or weighing of justice, ' or right values. All pronouncements of right and wrong are moral concerns, at their base religious. In recent years we have witnessed numerous marches on Washington in which one group or another demanded new "rights"; not freedom from state control but entitlement to state action, protection, or subsidy. In creating rights a state inevitably enlarges its bureaucracy. As a state creates new rights, it necessarily diminishes some rights for others. The modern secular view holds that individuals have just such rights as laws give them. Rights must have a reference point and specific context or they are meaningless; reference point determines the nature of the right exercised, defines who possesses it and sets limits to others who must respect it.

When we fail to live at peace, we need compulsion - so the law exists to compel. It does this by punishment.

Man's methods of law place two people in combat against each other, using advocates (lawyers) who, in the normal setting, keep the parties separate from one another. In this, we say that we search for the truth of the case.