LAW AS AN AGENT OF SOCIAL CONTROL

INTRODUCTION
No society exists without a framework of social organization. It provides
an order, which operates among its members who share some common
convictions to undergo through a regulated life. Social control is
necessary to protect an individual against himself as well as to save the
society from chaos.
It is the process by which a social order can be established and sustained.
In each and every society to control the conduct of the individuals and to
compel them to behave in conformity, certain kinds of mechanism are
found. They force and restrain the members from doing wrong.
These mechanisms can be broadly divided into two categories: -Law and
Government -Religion The Former acts as an external means of control,
where as the later exerts an internal control.
Law and government comprise of the political organization. Human life
is full of conflict and tensions. To hold the integrity of the group and also
to protect the group against the neighboring communities, law and order
is needed. Societies at present entirely depend on political institutions for
decision and power.
But in the beginning, there was nothing political. No one exercise any
general authority to rule or to decide or to negotiate on behalf of the
community. There was neither any state nor any government. Even no
legislation was there as like our civilized world.
The contemporary primitives still show a more or less same set up.
Nowhere, among the non literates we find any full-fledged legal system
with the court, the judge, the barristers, the solicitors, the jury, and the
law books and so on. Morgan, Maine and others have denied the
existence of government in the earliest stage of primitive society. They
had considered this fact in the perspective of simplest societies of the
contemporary period.
They cited the examples with reference to the societies like Andamanese
of Andaman Islands, the Bushmen of Africa, the Yamana of Terra del
Fuego, the Eskimos of Polar region, the aboriginal people of Australia
etc., who live at the lowest rank of subsistence economics and lack any
form of organized warfare. As there is no scope for civil law, these
societies are characterized by the criminal law. This means, some sort of
laws prevail there to deal with different criminal offences. But Lowie
showed that the view was not correct; absence of authority did not mean a
situation of anarchy. Although these societies hardly show any trace of
authority outside the family, but when an occasion arises in which
collective action is required, a leader is temporarily appointed from
among the elders of the tribe. Any man of the community may be chosen
for this purpose, but he should be superior of all, either for his bravery or
extraordinary performances or quite simply for his scrupulosity. Such a
local group can be taken as starting point for the rise of government.

LAW
“Law” means the whole process by which rules that are recognized to be
binding are maintained and enforced, including the motives and values
that influence judges, and all the manifold social forces that prevent the
majority of people from having to come before a judge at all.
When Radcliffe Brown wrote, “some simple societies have no law,
although all have customs which are supported by sanctions’, he was
thinking of a specific way of enforcing rules, and also by implications
defining laws and rules enforced in this way.
But when Evans- Pritchard wrote that within a Nuer tribe “there is law”,
he implied that law exists where people agree that certain actions infringe
the rights of others, and also agree that injuries can be made good, and so
disputes formally settled and the parties reconciled, by the payment of
compensation.
By implication he here defined law in terms of an institution, the
procedure of compensation and reconciliation; if a Nuer is injured by a
member of another tribe he is held to be justified in retaliating, but there
is no procedure for ending the quarrel, and therefore, on his argument, no
law
Rules and laws
Every society has rules that it calls “laws” and others that it calls
“customs”. Both are matters of knowing how people expect of them.
Where there are what Malinowski called “Codes, courts and constables”
people recognize that you can do many things that other people won’t
like, but only some of them will get you into trouble with the police; that
you may have many grievances against other people, but you can only go
to law about some of them.
The difficulty of definition arises where there are no courts or constables.
Some writers on that type of society play safe by referring to “customary
law”. Are we then- it is necessary? - to frame a definition to tell us which
of these rules are laws and which not? Such definitions are constantly
being offered, examined, and rejected.
What is called Austinian definition of law-“the command of a
sovereign”- obviously cannot apply where there is no sovereign, and it
has been rejected by lawyers in modern states as well. Some American
writers have said that law is whatever you can expect a court to enforce;
but that is no good where there are no courts.
The anthropologists who have contributed most to the study of law in the
last two decades are the American, E.A. Hoebel, and the South African,
Max Gluckman. Hoebel expands Radcliffe- Brown definition in a manner
that would grant the possession of law to the Nuer, and to other peoples
where the public opinion allows and approves retaliation although there is
no court to authorize punishment. Indeed Hoebel would say that there is a
court: what we call “the bar of the public opinion”. Hoebel writes: “A
social norm is legal if its neglect or infraction is regularly met, in threat or
in fact, by the application of physical force by an individual or group
possessing the socially recognized privilege of so acting.” Gluckman
dealt with this difficulty by showing that a distinction between types of
society is a different matter from a distinction between different types of
rule. Courts and constables are legal(or judiciary) institutions, and they
are possessed in some form by every society that recognizes a ruler, and
some others as well, such as the East African age- organized societies
where the settlement of disputesis the duty of elders as a body. Societies
without courts, says Gluckman, have rules of law but not legal rules. He
calls such societies a-legal. The rules he refers to are those that Radcliffe
Brown called jural. The word comes from the Latin word jus, meaning a
right, whereas “legal” comes from the Latin word lex, meaning a law in
the sense of something enacted (the command of the sovereign). So
justice by derivation means giving people their rights rather than
enforcing laws, and this is somewhere in people’s mind when, as they
often do, they contrast justice and legality
Law is a powerful method of control. The state runs its administration
through the government. It enforces law within its territory with the help
of the police, the army, the prison and the court; it enacts laws to regulate
the lives of the people. The deviants or the violators of social rules are
punished as per law; the state carries out certain function by means of
law. E.A. Ross says that ‘law is the most specialized and highly furnished
engine of social control employed by society. It is law, which prevents
the people from indulging in antisocial activities. The lawbreakers are
punished by the law of the state. It helps in governing our social conduct
and behaviors. Laws are essential in strengthening social control violation
of law considered a punishable offence. In short, law is an important
formal means of Control to regulate the individual behavior in society.
In modern society relationships are of secondary nature. Security of life
and property as well as the systematic ordering of relationships make
formalization of rules necessary. Law pre-scribes uniform norms and
penalties throughout a social [Link] were in mores and customs
earlier has now been formalized into a body of law. Law prohibits certain
actions for example anti-touchability act prohibits untouchability in any
form and a person practis-ing untouchability is liable to punishment.
Prohibition act forbids drinking at public places. In this way law exercises
a powerful influence upon the behavior of people in modern socie-ties.

FIGURE -1 -A MODEL SHOWING TYPES OF SOCIAL SANCTION IN THE