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>CB: What do you mean by "law" ?
Following HLA Hart, I'd say that law is the rules for guiding social behavior authoritatively enacted by competent authority.
Do you recognize the existence of custom before law in human society, i.e. a system of dispute resolutions without a state apparatus backing up the decisions ?
Yes.
Is it your position that law arises at the beginning of human society ?
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No.
Here you should bone up on your Hegel. Custom does OK in small homogeneous societies where no one much reflects on why we do things the way we do them around here. As soon as diverse interests and ideas and conflicting conceptions of the good arise, as they do in a complex free society, you need to go beyond custom to law.
jks
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