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Information about Law (principle)

For law within legal systems see law.


The term law is often used to refer to universal principles that describe the fundamental nature of something, to universal properties and relationships between things, or to descriptions that purport to explain these principles and relationships.

"Laws of nature"

Further information: Physical law


For example, "physical laws" such as the "law of gravity" (which is in fact more a "force" than a "law"), or "scientific laws" attempt to describe the fundamental nature of the universe itself. Laws of mathematics and logic describe the nature of rational thought and inference (Kant's transcendental idealism was precisely a determination of the a priori laws governing human thought before any interaction whatsoever with experience).

Within most fields of study, and in science in particular, the elevation of some principle of that field to the status of "law" usually takes place after a very long time during which the principle is used and tested and verified; though in some fields of study such laws are simply postulated as a foundation and assumed. Mathematical laws are somewhere in between: they are often arbitrary and unproven in themselves, but they are sometimes judged by how useful they are in making predictions about the real world. However, they ultimately rely on arbitrary axioms.

"Laws" in social sciences

Laws of economics are an attempt in modelization of economic behavior. Marxism criticized the belief in eternal "laws of economics", which it considered a product of the dominant ideology. It claimed that in fact, those so-called "laws of economics" were only the historical laws of capitalism, that is of a particular historical social formation. With the advent, in the 20th century, of the application of mathematical, statistical, and experimental techniques to economics, economic theory matured into a corpus of knowledge rooted in the scientific method rather than in philosophical argument.

Miscellaneous

Finally, the term is sometimes applied to less rigorous ideas that may be interesting observations or relationships, practical or ethical guidelines (also called rules of thumb), and even humorous parodies of such laws.

Examples of scientific laws include Boyle's law of gases, conservation laws, Ohm's law, and others. Laws of other fields of study include Occam's razor as a principle of philosophy and Say's law in economics. Examples of observed phenomena often described as laws include the Titius-Bode law of planetary positions, Zipf's law of linguistics, Thomas Malthus's Principle of Population or Malthusian Growth Model, Moore's law of technological growth. Other laws are pragmatic and observational, such as the law of unintended consequences.

Some humorous parodies of such laws include adages such as Murphy's law and its many variants, and Godwin's Law of Internet conversations.

See also

LAW may refer to:
  • Lightweight Anti-tank Weapon, like the M72 LAW (US Army) and the LAW 80 (British Army)
  • Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights (also known as LAW)
  • League of American Bicyclists, formerly known as the League of American Wheelmen

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Universality is the quality ascribed to an entity whose existence is consistent throughout the universe. In philosophy, universalism is a doctrine or school in which it is claimed that universal facts can be discovered and which is understood then as being in opposition to
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For a list of set rules, see .


A physical law, scientific law, or a law of nature is a scientific generalization based on empirical observations of physical behavior.
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Gravitation is a natural phenomenon by which all objects with mass attract each other. In everyday life, gravitation is most familiar as the agency that endows objects with weight.
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Science (from the Latin scientia, 'knowledge'), in the broadest sense, refers to any systematic knowledge or practice.[1] Examples of the broader use included political science and computer science, which are not incorrectly named, but rather named according to
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Mathematics (colloquially, maths or math) is the body of knowledge centered on such concepts as quantity, structure, space, and change, and also the academic discipline that studies them. Benjamin Peirce called it "the science that draws necessary conclusions".
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Logic (from Classical Greek λόγος logos; meaning word, thought, idea, argument, account, reason, or principle) is the study of the principles and criteria of valid inference and demonstration.
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Immanuel Kant (22 April, 1724 – 12 February, 1804) was a philosopher from Königsberg in the Kingdom of Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of modern Europe and the closing period of the Enlightenment.
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Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant presents it as the point of view which holds that our experience of things is about how they appear to us, not about those things as they are in and of themselves.
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a priori" and "a posteriori" are used in philosophy to distinguish between deductive and inductive reasoning, respectively. Attempts to define clearly or explain a priori and a posteriori
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axiom is a sentence or proposition that is not proved or demonstrated and is considered as self-evident or as an initial necessary consensus for a theory building or acceptation.
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Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Greek for oikos (house) and nomos (custom or law), hence "rules of the house(hold).
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mathematical model is an abstract model that uses mathematical language to describe the behaviour of a system. Mathematical models are used particularly in the natural sciences and engineering disciplines (such as physics, biology, and electrical engineering) but also in the social
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Marxism is both the theory and the political practice (that is, the praxis) derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Any political practice or theory that is based on an interpretation of the works of Marx and Engels may be called Marxism; this includes
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Belief is the psychological state in which an individual is convinced of the truth or validity of a proposition or premise (argument). Belief does not necessarily confer the ability to adequately prove one's main contention to other people, who may disagree.
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Economic systems

Ideologies and Theories
Primitive communism
Capitalist economy
Corporate economy
Fascist economy
Laissez-faire
Mercantilism
Natural economy
Social market economy
Socialist economy
Communist economy


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A rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation. It is an easily learned and easily applied procedure for approximately calculating or recalling some value, or for making some determination.
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Boyle's law (sometimes referred to as the Boyle-Mariotte law) is one of the gas laws and basis of derivation for the ideal gas law, which describes the relationship between the product pressure and volume within a closed system as constant when temperature remains at a fixed
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conservation law states that a particular measurable property of an isolated physical system does not change as the system evolves. Any particular conservation law is a mathematical identity to certain symmetry of a physical system.
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Ohm's law states that, in an electrical circuit, the current passing through a conductor between two points is proportional to the potential difference (i.e. voltage drop or voltage) across the two points, and inversely proportional to the resistance between them.
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additional references or sources for verification.
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Philosophy is the discipline concerned with questions of how one should live (ethics); what sorts of things exist and what are their essential natures (metaphysics); what counts as genuine knowledge (epistemology); and what are the correct principles of reasoning (logic).
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In economics, Say’s Law or Say’s Law of Markets is a principle attributed to French businessman and economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832) stating that there can be no demand without supply.
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Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Greek for oikos (house) and nomos (custom or law), hence "rules of the house(hold).
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The Titius-Bode law (sometimes termed just Bode's law) is a hypothesis that the semi-major axes of planets in the solar system follow a simple rule. It was discredited with the discovery of Neptune in 1846.
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Zipf's law, publicized by Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf (IPA [zɪf]), stated that, in a corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency
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Thomas Robert Malthus, FRS (13th February, 1766 – 29th December, 1834), was an English demographer and political economist. He is best known for his highly influential views on population growth.
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The Malthusian growth model, sometimes called the simple exponential growth model, is essentially exponential growth based on a constant rate of compound interest. The model is named after the Reverend Thomas Malthus, who authored
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Moore's Law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.
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For the 1996 novel by John Ross, see .


Unintended consequences are situations where an action results in an outcome that is not (or not only) what is intended.
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