Depends what this “society” is. If we’re talking about a Renaissance vision of “Civil Society”, then I can hardly imagine law not being an integral and embedded part of it.
It’s also important to note how the legal framework is born. Different schools of thought have argued on this topic, namely Naturalism which postulates that legal norms are not created but have an intrinsic value in Nature (or from another perspective their legal character is derived from a transcendent entity). Postivism argues from a more realistic perspective that the State is the source of the law; so there is no law without a State who’s the legitimate beholder of the monopoly on violence. Meanwhile, Marxism would criticize both those theories classified as “liberal” by relating the creation of law with commodity exchange between the capital owner and the laborer, and consequently law is born when disputes arise between those two and a State would interfere to settle their dispute.
By applying those theories, you’d be able to arrive at different conclusions for your problem.
Btw, if you’re interested in any of these theories, you can read some of Locke and Montesquieu (Naturalism), Kelsen (positivism) and Pashukanis (Marxism).
Depends what this “society” is. If we’re talking about a Renaissance vision of “Civil Society”, then I can hardly imagine law not being an integral and embedded part of it.
It’s also important to note how the legal framework is born. Different schools of thought have argued on this topic, namely Naturalism which postulates that legal norms are not created but have an intrinsic value in Nature (or from another perspective their legal character is derived from a transcendent entity). Postivism argues from a more realistic perspective that the State is the source of the law; so there is no law without a State who’s the legitimate beholder of the monopoly on violence. Meanwhile, Marxism would criticize both those theories classified as “liberal” by relating the creation of law with commodity exchange between the capital owner and the laborer, and consequently law is born when disputes arise between those two and a State would interfere to settle their dispute.
By applying those theories, you’d be able to arrive at different conclusions for your problem.
Btw, if you’re interested in any of these theories, you can read some of Locke and Montesquieu (Naturalism), Kelsen (positivism) and Pashukanis (Marxism).