When you live together as people, it is useful to have rights and obligations. Think of traffic law: which side of the road should you normally stay on and who has priority in certain situations? The word ‘normally’ indicates what the norm or rule of conduct is. And every norm is based on values: equality, freedom and the like.

Rights and obligations can come about in different ways. They can arise from habit. They can be mutually agreed upon. The legislature can formulate them. And if the judge makes rulings, the rulings of the judge also count as law. As a result, there are also different sources of law: customary law can be derived from books, professional journals and the like, while the law of the legislature can be derived from laws and court judgments (= jurisprudence) also count as sources of law. But… there are always differences of interpretation between how the law was once intended and how different people understand the rights and obligations. In the Middle Ages, for example, people thought about everything and anything differently than they do now and people often attached different values to norms. So if people disagree about rights and obligations, they can check whether they can come to an agreement, sometimes a mediator is needed or the court has to be involved.

There is public law and private law. Criminal law and administrative law are part of public law. In criminal law, for example, it has been established that you are not allowed to steal something or that you enter someone’s house without being asked: if you violate that right, you can be punished. Administrative law includes environmental law, health law and the like. Private law includes the law of legal entities, family law, contract law and the like. And then, with all those forms of law, a distinction is also made between what the law entails (= substantive law) and how to act in the event that substantive law is deviated from (= procedural law). How rights and obligations are regulated within a state is expressed in constitutional law. And finally, there is also international law, so the law that has been agreed upon by nations and often does not directly apply to citizens or cannot be invoked.