Law is a body of rules that regulates the behavior of people in their interactions with one another, typically through enforcement by a controlling authority. The law can be based on many different things, including religious precepts, societal customs, or social justice principles. It can also be based on a judge’s decision in a specific case, or on the rules of a particular legal system. There are several schools of thought about what the law should consist of, including natural-law theory, which emphasizes rights that are “unalienable” (as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and in other writings), positive law, which takes as a given that the state is the sovereign, and moral law, which emphasizes ethical norms and the will of a deity.
In the United States, most laws are derived from judicial decisions, rather than from legislative statutes. The courts follow a doctrine known as stare decisis, which means that their decisions in similar cases will bind future judges. This is a major difference between the United States and most other nations, where the legislature creates detailed statutes.
Other sources of law include treaties[12] and what is known as customary international law,[13] which is a set of broad principles, along natural-law lines, that most nations agree to. The law also includes sub-disciplines such as labor law, which covers a tripartite industrial relationship between workers, employers and trade unions; property law, which deals with ownership of goods, such as land, cars and buildings; and tort law, which is the type of case that would be heard in a court of law, such as libel, slander, false advertising or products liability.