Oral Law in Jurisprudence
From a legal point of view, an oral law can be:
- a habit, or custom with legal relevance or when the formal law expressly refers to it (but in this latter case, it is properly an indirect source of legal rights and obligations);
- a spoken command or order that has to be respected as a law (in most modern western legal systems, some dispositions can be issued by word in given cases of emergency).
An oral law, intended as a body of rules, can be admitted in jurisprudence as long as it shows some efficacy, therefore it needs that the law is public, the human action is evaluated by a judge (ordinarily producing a sentence according to the general interpretation of the law) and then a punishment has eventually to be put into effect. Some oral laws provide all these elements (for instance, some codes of conduct in use among criminal associations like mafia do have a well known law, a judge, a condemnation), while others usually miss some of them.
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Famous quotes containing the words oral and/or law:
“The Americans are violently oral.... That’s why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all—isn’t respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedient’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)