Policy refers to the principles, values, and beliefs that form the moral and ethical foundation of a society and its legal system. Policy includes what a society holds as good, important, valuable and in need of protecting. Policy also includes what a society holds as immoral and unethical. It helps to think of policy as a value system that guides legal thinking in philosophical matters.
For example, the concept of damages in law is based on Policy. Western thinking recognizes the right of individuals to own property. When one individual’s property is destroyed by another, the injured individual has the right to be compensated. The actual compensation is determined through the legal process of calculating damages. What a court holds as being compensable damages as compared to what a court holds as being non-compensable damages reflects the policy of that court system.
About the Legal Elements
With legal terminology it’s important to understand both the what and the why.
That is, you need to know both what the term means and why it’s important in the eyes of the law. Without understanding the why, you can miss the point even with a perfectly good definition in mind. That’s why Clear-Point Law has created a proprietary system for indexing legal terminology. We call it The Legal Elements.
The legal elements provide non-lawyers with a context for legal terms. These elements represent the key concepts of legal thinking and provide the answer to the question, why is this important. It doesn’t matter if the issue is criminality or contracts. For a description of all 12 Legal Elements, see our Overview of the Legal Elements.
Clear-Point Law Dictionary
