Laws should be flexible enough to take account of various circumstances, times and places.

Laws should be flexible enough to take account of various circumstances, times and places.

The speaker asserts that laws should be flexible enough to take account of various circumstances, times and places. I think law should be flexible to some extent, as that not only are laws principles implemented to cope with incidents, also the unified principle to maintain justice.  On the one hand, laws should be flexible to suit different situations, on the other hand, unified principles make laws procrustean.

The purpose of legislation is to defend the fundamental rights and rule the human activities, which infer that laws must be unified. When the legislator differentiates the laws, it would be unfair for people. Such laws with unbalanced institutions would induce conflicts among people. e.g. Ancient India divided its people into four walks, which incurred hardship for the lower classes and enfranchised the upper classes. The shadow of that ugly regime still impedes the development of modern India. Many civilizations experience similar decrees. As time goes up, modern revolution subverts that restrictions and establishes a fair system to treat the people equally, which must be considered as a great contribution to human race.

Objectively speaking, there are also realistic factors demanding adaptions of laws to different situations. Mores and customs vary between different regions, which needs the legislation to deal with those anomalous characteristics. In current time, major countries like the U.S, PRC, and Russia are all multi-people nations, which institutes own autonomy. Autonomy is exactly a reasonable method to cope with various circumstances, in which different law may be used to different people.

As the aforementioned part has demonstrated, when it comes to basic human right, we should apply unified standards; and when talking about  kaleidoscopic situations, we should aptly use different laws. But, the line between those two discussions is usually not as clear as we postulate. That may leave us a quondary.

Don’t worry, there are more than one way to skin the cat, In spite of legislation, jurisdiction, jury system can also be conducive to solve that dilemma. To streamline the exposition, I only talk about jury system here. We could delegate both law pundits and local person, in the sense that local custom would be dignified by participation of local inhabitants.

Moreover, some measures, seeming not relevant to this topic, should be processed providently. That is, foster the communication between regions and people, to cultivate more common views and emotions within the country. The unification of people is the ultimate determinant to undergird the unification of laws.

To recap, it is not deniable that laws should adapt to different circumstances. But the rule of justice urges them to be unified. On the one hand, we should strengthen the unification of laws about principles, on the other hand, we should modify laws to handle diversity. Last but not the least, we should try to consolidate the people unification, which will help laws to function better.