Law and Society Essay

According to Merriam-Webster, law is the whole system or set of rules made by the government of a town, state, country, etc. However, I personally find it very difficult to give a set definition to items as complex and alive as the law. Yes, technically the law is composed of rules that are set and enforced by a governing body, but, due to its ever-changing nature, it is much more than that. Rules are very under-appreciated in our society. The mindset of the vast majority of our generation sees rules as a tool that adults use to keep young people like us from having fun, leading to an innumerable amount of arrests. In other words, an entire generation has grown up under the assumption that rules serve no purpose but to keep fun away from those trying to have it, yet this simply is not the case. I am not trying to claim that I follow all rules and have never broken the law. One would be hard-pressed to find a driver that has never gone over the speed limit or a pedestrian that has never taken a step out of the crosswalk, but these laws that are constantly being broken are not here to prevent this driver or that pedestrian from getting to work on time. On the contrary, they are put in place to keep people safe. This very fact is the reason that, as I mentioned before, the law is so alive and always changing. Some people would like to think that law is a static set of rules, but this is just simply not so. If law was static, there would still be slavery in the United States, African-Americans would not be considered citizens, and women would not be allowed to vote. The law is always changing because the society that it governs over is always changing. New laws must be created to accommodate for new technologies, which have opened new frontiers that need governing over. For example, there were most likely no laws about running red lights or texting and driving before cars and cell phones were invented. These are just two everyday examples of the law adapting to our modern society. Because we all live under these laws, like it or not, they have a profound effect on our lives. Personally, they do seem to have a limiting effect on my life occasionally, like making me late to school because I cannot drive any faster, though it could be debated that it is my fault for not leaving on time. Nevertheless, I realize that laws true function is to keep me safe from the dangers that come with breaking them. I do not personally believe that I have had a large, if any, impact on the law in today's society. However, my generation as a whole has arguably contributed the largest amount of change on the law since the Founding Fathers. In the past twenty years, the digital age our generation has been through has brought a considerable amount of new possibilities for the world, bringing with it the need for laws to govern it. Our generation has forever changed the law system of America by introducing an entire new genre of laws regarding the massive surge in technology, and we will continue to invent and progress further into the unknown frontiers of the future, which will undoubtedly bring along many more laws, regulations, and protection for a society inclined to exploit any resources available by any means available. The law, however, has had a profound impact on me. I have never been a criminal, at least by the standards of the connotations that the

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