Law is a system of rules that a society or government develops to deal with crime, business agreements, and social relationships. It also refers to the people who work in this system, such as lawyers and prosecutors.
The law shapes politics, economics, history and society in many ways and serves as a mediator of relations between people.
Legal justification is a matter of legal normativity, not validity (Raz 1970: 175-183; MacCormick 1977: 189; Raz 1994: 258-263). The basis for legal justification typically involves a general rule that, given a set of factual circumstances, “every person has a right in her/his good name” or “every person holds a right to X in his/her property.”
Rights are preemptory reasons to ph that, as a result, qualitatively precede certain other reasons pertaining as to whether or not to ph, such as collective goals (Lyons 1982; Kamm 2002: 489-497). Thus, if a primary right (a right that requires some act to be violated) is in conflict with some even weightier reason, rights still can prevail.
Secondary rights, on the other hand, are remedial rights grounded in a violation of a primary right. They are often enforceable by the state through the mechanism of the law, and can include restitution of unjust gains or compensation for the violation of a right, as well as proximate losses from the deprivation of a right.
A legal system committed to rights orients its legal principles towards treating the individual person as law’s primary unit of concern, rather than groups or communities. This is a common insight shared by all the theories of rights, including Bentham’s notion that law should promote good social consequences; Dworkin’s view that the individual is law’s most important unit of interest; and Lyons’ and Jones’s recasting of the extension of state power.