What is Law? Let us start with a more general concept-that of a social practice.  Law is a social practice of a particular sort.  We can think of social practices, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, as language "games."  They are games in the sense that we engage in them with others and according to implicit rules (i.e., we may never formulate them).  They are not (always) games in the sense of merely trying to defeat an opponent or in being frivolous ways to pass time.  In fact, they are the very structure of our life and all games have a place in what Wittgenstein calls our "form of life."  We use language in social contexts according to vague rules as an ongoing道of life.

Language games come in two broad categories, or rather we may say that language plays two distinguishable roles in our lives.  The first is to communicate information. This is the most familiar and dominant role of language in the West. Science can be thought of as such a language game.  In it, we seek how best to describe, predict and understand what happens (or will happen).  The other role of language is to guide and coordinate our behavior-to enable us to make common arrangements and plans, to guide our interactions, and to direct our feelings of pride, guilt, and shame.  We call these, respectively, descriptive and prescriptive language games.

Our language games often combine the two functions. We can often guide by giving information. For example, when we say someone is brave we are praising her.  However, we would not use that particular form of praise (say as compared with 'pious' or 'filial' or 'smart') unless some description of her were also true.  For example, she reacts to danger in a certain way (as opposed to how she reacts to her father or to religious instruction). Similarly, when I say something structurally descriptive like "the door is open," it may implicitly request (or order) you to close the door.

We sometime call the descriptive/prescriptive distinction the 'is/ought' or the fact/value distinction.  The paradigms of each are science and morality.  Usually we can spot prescriptive statements (or the prescriptive component of a statement) by noticing that it can be translated using 'good' 'right' or 'should' or some other clearly prescriptive term. So when people said in the U. S. A. that Nixon has been punished enough, we can understand 'enough' as equivalent to "as much as he should be." And when someone says, "you drink too much" it means more than your should.

Now let us focus on mainly prescriptive language games. Whole families of these come to mind.  In all of them, we can find the core language of 'good' 'right' 'should' and 'ought'.  But they usually also have some specialized language that marks their different areas of concern. Some prominent prescriptive "language games" are art, fashion, manners, religion, prudence, morals/ethics, mores, taste and law.  We can illuminate them by a kind of comparison.

How do we distinguish them? Each has a criteria or standard for how to make an assertion of the type.  Some of them are closed on a description-that is, some objective facts about the world would entail the corresponding evaluation.  For example, if God actually has commanded it, then we should do it to count as pious.  If orange is "in" this year (all the socially dominant people are wearing orange) then it is fashionable and chic and the "right" thing to wear. If everyone eats with chopsticks and slurps their soup, then it is not bad manners to do so.  Mores are like manners but considered more important.  Hence, like manners we may tie them to facts about patterns of behavior in particular locations and times.

That makes both manners and mores different from morality proper. We usually think of morality as universal. Typically, it is not "closed" on any description.  If something causes pleasure or makes you rich, it does not always follow that it is good. This is somewhat controversial and there are always some moral "realists" around and their arguments can be quite sophisticated-but we will not trace them here.[1]

Art is similarly controversial.  We know that artistic styles vary a great deal between cultures and times.  However, it surely is possible that beauty and ugliness are objective features of the best craft products of all cultures and that we could learn to appreciate true art from whatever time or place for itself.

Prudence too raises some problems.  Since it frequently contrasts with "moral" some think of it as non-normative (as if your self-interest could be determined by medicine or economics).  Others think 'prudence' is like 'moral' in being distinct from any descriptive property (like rich or happy). It also differs from moral in making the evaluative judgment only for oneself rather than for all humans (or all sentient creatures).

We include taste here because it is the best example of a purely subjective language game. We do not disagree when chocolate tastes good to you and strawberry tastes good to me.  We do not treat this as something it makes sense to argue (present proofs) about. For most of the others, we argue a lot and try to convince others to go along with us. To the degree to which we find it appropriate to reason about the judgments in a language game, we may call that game 'absolute' or 'objective'. To the degree that we find reasoning and persuasion inappropriate, we can call it 'relative' or 'subjective'.

All of these games play roles in all our lives but people differ greatly in which point of view they give a dominant role in their whole lives. We sometimes call this a different "sense of values." A religious person might place 'piety' above 'justice.'  Most philosophers think is it important to have the moral language game at the top. The ranking you give the rest defines your personal identifications or what we call a "sense of values."

The reason for this survey is to locate the language game of law in this family of prescriptive games and see what its special properties are.  We have specialized terms for nearly all of the prescriptive games-'beauty', 'chic', 'pious', 'filial', 'polite', etc. The specialized terms for law include 'legal' 'illegal' 'culpable' and so forth. Otherwise, law has the usual feature that we can use 'ought' and 'should', 'right' and 'wrong' in expressing legal judgments.  We might modify these to make the contrast with morality more explicit. "You legally ought to do A" v. "you morally ought to do A."

One key question in philosophy of law is this: is law "closed on facts."  Clearly, law is relative in some ways -- what is against the law in one state need not be against the law in another. The same goes for different times. However, is there any simple fact of the matter that settles what the law of a state is-what our legal rights and duties are? Some of the theories (positivist) say there are such social facts; others deny it.