Oral Law - Oral Law in Jurisprudence

Oral Law in Jurisprudence

From a legal point of view, an oral law can be:

• a habit, or custom with legal relevance or when the formal law expressly refers to it (but in this latter case, it is properly an indirect source of legal rights and obligations);
• a spoken command or order that has to be respected as a law (in most modern western legal systems, some dispositions can be issued by word in given cases of emergency).

An oral law, intended as a body of rules, can be admitted in jurisprudence as long as it shows some efficacy, therefore it needs that the law is public, the human action is evaluated by a judge (ordinarily producing a sentence according to the general interpretation of the law) and then a punishment has eventually to be put into effect. Some oral laws provide all these elements (for instance, some codes of conduct in use among criminal associations like mafia do have a well known law, a judge, a condemnation), while others usually miss some of them.