HOW DOES LAW AFFECTS OUR EVERYDAY LIFE
LAW AFFECTS OUR EVERYDAY LIFE: Some people are affected more and others less. However, the law and government do affect us all in some common ways. Most importantly, the law and government affect us by allowing us to live in a society where we are not related to most other people and we generally do not even know who they are.
Most definitely the so-called “civil law” or, depending on you location, the “common law”.
The “law” is a set of rules designed to regulate relations (a) between humans and (b) between humans and objects. What exactly those rules are, and how they operate, varies.
Typically, when people think of the “law”, they think of circumstances when the “law” becomes visible, i.e. in exceptional circumstances that are potentially life-changing, i.e. criminal law,or when the state makes it’s presence known, by demanding you pay taxes.
However, daily life is usually regulated by a much larger degree by the so-called “zivilrecht”, for lack of a better word, a “law of interpersonal relationships”.
You get up in the morning, out of bed? Chances are you bought that bed someplace, so the law of contracts, which governs sales, has something to do with it. The bed is standing in a flat or house, which is either rented → law on lease agreements, or owned → property law. You take a shower → you have a service agreement with your utilities provider, who ensures that there is water in the pipe leading to your domicile.
Get dressed → law of contracts concerning how you bought the clothes you wear, → property law concerning you’re allowed to do with them as you please.
The leave house and walk down the street → traffic laws are designed dot make that a safe and convenient experience: and enter a coffee shop. There, you buy a cup of coffee, a bagel, and an newspaper for your breakfast → depending on where in the world you are, you just entered into, and executed, anything between one and nine contracts governing the passage of ownership of coffee, bagel and newspaper to you, reciprocal obligations (“stuff” for “money) concerning the quality, payment of the items you purchased, and them now “belonging” to you, and not to the coffee shop, any more.
If the coffee shop is part of a chain, chances are you will not be contracting with the guy behind the counter, but with a company (f.e, Starbucks?), so laws on representation and agency also apply. In 90% of the cases, if your coffee is cold, you will complain to whoever sold you your coffee if the coffee is too cold → Implied terms, coffee is suitable for human consumption and of a “typically to be expected” quality and temperature.
All of this happens more or less “in plain sight”, but out of mind. It is supposed to happen that way. The law is there, more or less invisible to non-lawyers, but it only becomes visible when things go wrong. y Our everyday lives are typically enmeshed by legal rules, most of them concerning “commercial” transactions in the widest sense. That is the area of law that most of us will find prevalent in our everyday lives.
Everything else, Taxes, criminal law, etc., is not nearly as prevalent.
Side note: A lot of areas are also explicitly NOT regulated by the law. “Social interations”, for example: If you invite someone for dinner, and then let them stand outside in the rain,you will typically not suffer legal consequences (i.e. you will not have breeched a “contract”), but you will suffer purely social consequences (chances are, whoever you invited will not want to see you again).