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Most people understand one purpose of law instinctively. Law keeps order. It tells us not to steal, not to assault one another, not to drive drunk, not to break our contracts, and not to take what belongs to someone else. When we violate those rules, there are consequences. But law does something else—something quieter and perhaps more powerful. The law teaches.
What society prohibits, permits, protects, and punishes eventually says something about what society believes to be good. And that raises a much older question: Can law actually make us good? The answer, I think, is partly. Law can sometimes make us do the good, but it has limitations in making us actually desire the good.
For much of Western history, the idea that law should concern itself with virtue was plain common sense. Aristotle, the ancient philosopher, saw law partly as a means of habituating citizens toward good conduct, which is to say that the law forces good habits. Aquinas later argued that law could help lead people toward virtue, while recognizing an important limitation: human law should not attempt to prohibit every vice or evil. A society that tried to punish every act of selfishness, cowardice, dishonesty, ingratitude, or cruelty would quickly become intolerable. Government would require extraordinary power merely to police ordinary human imperfection. The law can prevent someone from striking his parent. It cannot teach him to honor his parents—as a child under their authority, as an adult relating to them differently, or eventually as a son caring for them in old age.
A person may tell the truth on the witness stand because perjury is a crime. That does not mean he loves truth. A parent may provide financial support because a court ordered it. That does not make the parent loving. Law can compel conduct. It cannot command character into existence.
It would be tempting to stop there. Perhaps law should simply prevent people from harming one another and otherwise remain neutral about how people ought to live. There is enormous appeal to that idea. Allowing government to define the good person carries obvious dangers. Who decides what is good? Which virtues should be encouraged? Which vices should be discouraged? And how much power should government possess to enforce its answer? The truth of the matter, a complicated truth is as follows: Law is never entirely neutral.
When the law protects something, it teaches us that the thing deserves protection. When the law punishes something, it announces that the conduct has crossed a boundary. When the law recognizes an obligation, it tells us that one person may legitimately expect something from another. And when the law refuses to intervene, even that decision establishes a boundary between what belongs to public authority and what belongs somewhere else. Law therefore teaches whether it intends to or not.
This makes the relationship between law and culture much more complicated than it first appears. We sometimes imagine law as something created at the top and imposed downward:
Legislature → Law → People
Real life looks more cyclical, like a circle. Culture shapes law. Law shapes conduct. Conduct becomes custom. Custom shapes culture. Culture shapes law again.
Consider racial integration. Law alone could not eliminate racial prejudice. Courts and legislatures could prohibit certain forms of discrimination, open institutions, protect legal rights, and require changes in conduct. They could not order one person to respect another in his heart. And yet changing conduct still mattered, enormously.
People who might otherwise have remained separated began sharing schools, workplaces, businesses, neighborhoods, and public institutions. Legal change was certainly not the only force involved, nor did prejudice disappear because a statute was enacted.The simple reality is that sometimes being required to share a community forces us to reckon with prejudices that separation allowed us to ignore. Sometimes people learn to live beside one another before they learn to see one another differently.
That possibility should make us take the formative power of law seriously. It should also make us very cautious before changing laws, because laws are subject to the whim of public opinion.
If law teaches, an obvious question follows: Who teaches the teacher? Governmental law does not descend upon society from some perfectly wise source standing outside of culture. Legislators are elected. Presidents and governors are elected. Judges operate within institutions created and shaped through political processes. Citizens vote. Lawyers argue. Movements organize. Public opinion changes.
The people making and interpreting law are themselves products of families, communities, institutions, prejudices, virtues, fashions, fears, and the age in which they live. So the relationship becomes circular again. Culture influences law. Law influences culture. And the culture produced in part by yesterday's law helps determine tomorrow's law.
That cycle can produce moral progress, and it can just as easily produce moral error. This is why the power of law to form people should make us cautious about using it too aggressively. Public opinion is not infallible merely because it is popular. Neither is government made infallible because it acts through legal institutions. The fact that law teaches is not an argument for giving law unlimited authority, but an argument for restraint.
Law can command me not to assault my neighbor. It cannot command me to love him. Law can require parents to provide for their children. It cannot make them tender. Law can enforce a contract. It cannot make someone trustworthy. Law can prohibit cruelty. It cannot produce compassion.There is a whole territory of human goodness that coercion cannot reach. And that territory must be formed somewhere.
Families form children long before judges encounter them. Schools teach habits as well as information. Friendships teach loyalty. Work teaches responsibility. Neighborhoods establish expectations. Religious institutions, civic organizations, traditions, and voluntary associations transmit ideas about sacrifice, restraint, courage, forgiveness, responsibility, and belonging. These institutions can fail. They can transmit bad customs as easily as good ones. But government cannot simply replace them.
Of all these institutions, the family may be the most foundational because it helps determine how a child first encounters nearly all the others. Long before someone becomes a voter, employee, juror, neighbor, or public official, they are a baby learning what the world expects from them.
This produces a strange paradox. A good society needs good laws. But good laws depend upon lawmakers, judges, jurors, police officers, lawyers, parents, witnesses, and citizens possessing qualities that law itself cannot guarantee. The legal system absolutely depends upon virtues it cannot command into existence. Among those virtues are sincerity and restraint.
Sincerity requires us to take another person's position seriously enough to consider the possibility that he sees something we do not. It does not require pretending every argument is equally correct. It requires approaching difficult questions with enough humility to listen before exercising power. Restraint gives that sincerity time to do its work.
Not every disagreement must be settled immediately. Not every majority must exercise every ounce of power available to it. Some difficult questions require patience, persuasion, compromise, and the slow work of building consensus. To be sure, law may sometimes require decisive action, but a society that loses the virtue of restraint may eventually discover that every political victory becomes merely an opportunity to impose today's certainty upon a tomorrow we do not yet know.
There is another reason for restraint. Children.
Legal debates are usually conducted among adults, and understandably so. Adults vote, legislate, litigate, judge, and govern. But they are not the only people affected by the decisions being made. Every generation inherits a moral world it did not choose and leaves one behind it cannot fully control. Law is one of the ways we transmit that inheritance. A society legislates not only among the living, but in the presence of those who will inherit it, even those not yet born.
Children are watching what adults permit themselves to do, what institutions praise, what courts protect, and what the law condemns. Good law therefore requires a certain intergenerational humility: the world does not belong exclusively to the adults currently powerful enough to shape it. It never has.
Sometimes that means adults restraining themselves not merely because every exercise of freedom causes an immediate and measurable injury, but because freedom exercised publicly can also create customs, expectations, and examples. That principle must itself be restrained. “Think of the children” cannot become a blank check for government intrusion into private life.
But neither should law pretend that children appear from nowhere at adulthood, untouched by the world adults constructed around them. They are watching us build the society they will inherit. And one day, it will be theirs.
Partly. Law can make certain good conduct more likely and certain destructive conduct more difficult. It can establish boundaries, protect goods, discourage wrongdoing, shape habits, and influence customs. But law cannot make us desire what is good. That work happens deeper within human beings and within institutions government can protect but never fully replace.
A good law should therefore begin with a certain sincerity about where a culture actually is, recognize the goodness of restraint, and pursue justice with an awareness that today's decisions will become part of someone else's inheritance. Good law cannot manufacture good people, but it can help preserve the conditions in which good people can be formed.
The question is not whether law teaches. It always teaches. The question is what it teaches—and whether what it teaches is true to human dignity.
