1 What is law?
Your ideas about law are shaped through a series of images and encounters, and these affect your expectations of law as an area of study.
Activity 1 asks you to think about the meaning of, and your own impressions about, law and lawyers.
Activity 1 Perceptions of law
Write down up to five words or phrases, or draw images, that you associate with ‘law’. Try to focus on what law means to you personally. (You may want to return to what you have written later on in the course and reflect on whether your thoughts have changed.)
Once you have compiled a list, see if you can separate your observations into positive and negative attributes. For example, if you associate law with ‘tradition’ do you see this as being a positive attribute or a negative one?
| Positive | Negative |
|---|---|
Comment
There are no right answers to this activity, which probably provoked a range of responses and ideas about law. It is important to recognise that you have pre-existing knowledge and personal values that will affect your engagement with this course. Words you may have thought of might include ‘complicated’, ‘useful’, ‘rules’ and ‘boundaries’, or you may have come up with a completely different set of answers.
As you progress through the course, you can return to this activity and reflect on whether your views have changed. It is important to realise that your impressions of the law, gained from your own and others’ experiences, as well as media coverage, are likely to have an impact on your thoughts and feelings. It may also have an impact on how you feel about studying the law.
If you included the words ‘difficult’ or ‘boring’ in your list when answering, you will not have been alone. Law, like social work, has an image problem that, while not entirely undeserved, needs to be addressed, particularly in the context of concerns about inequality of access to law and the power that an understanding of law can bring. This has clear implications for promoting social justice, which is fundamental to social work. You will see that the law can assist in developing sound, evidence-based and anti-oppressive practice, so long as professionals are committed to practising in this manner.
Any attempt to provide a definitive answer to the question ‘What is law?’ has the potential to mislead, and legal theorists continue to debate its meaning. At first, this might seem unsatisfactory and difficult to comprehend, given people’s common understanding of law. The law may be defined as a set of rules and regulations, but this is a very basic definition that does not help when attempting to analyse the relationship between law and social work.
It is important to recognise that negative views of law are directly affected by how it is defined. For example, some social work students can view the law as technical and difficult to learn, which is usually based on the belief that studying law involves remembering an endless series of rules. However, the content of law changes over time and is not a fixed body of rules that they are expected to learn and recite. What is important for students of social work to learn is the underlying principles – how to find relevant law and apply it in practice, and keep abreast of legal developments – rather than committing whole areas to memory.