Individual Rights and Social Order

Individual Rights and Social Order
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Individual Rights and Social Order
The mandate to protect the lives and property of individuals remains a fundamental component of various legal systems of the world. In the U.S., citizens are accorded individual rights in the Bill of Rights, which protects them from various infringements by other individuals or the government. Amidst such rights and liberties lies the need for social order. Hence, the law has extended to instil some limitations that could extend to the need to pursue social order. Often, questions are asked on avenues of balancing individual rights with the need to anchor social behaviors and interactions on a status quo. This paper delves into individual rights and social order by exploring various prospects, including informal and formal controls, the evolution of disputes, impacts of the law on social change, and the value of both substantive and procedural law. A detailed understanding of individual rights and social order is a valuable tool as it extends to defining the scope of the legal systems and the interactions between the law and social controls, which are necessary for a society in which legal and social prospects keep antagonizing one another.
Difference in Formal and Informal Social Controls
Social control is a fundamental element of contemporary litigious societies with impacts on how individuals are regulated. Social control implies avenues by which societies regulate human behaviors (Hartley, Rabe, & Champion, 2018). Often, social controls are instilled to create a sense of equilibrium in the behaviors of individuals. However, there are behaviors that societies consider deviant, which are effectively regulated through different avenues of social control. Formal and informal social control avenues are the primary approaches that societies use to regulate human behaviors. Formal control is the avenues or mechanisms that take the formal approach. That is, formal control mechanisms are written, approved, and are official. In this case, rules and laws encompass the formal controls that are employed in controlling behaviors.
Conversely, informal controls are unwritten avenues of controlling behaviors. Prospects such as values, norms, and traditions are tools of informal social control. Societies can employ either formal or informal inputs to resolve most situations that they face.
There are notable differences between formal and informal social control systems. Primary among the differences is on the enforcing units. While the informal social control avenues are enforced by families, workplaces, religious institutions, and schools, the formal control practices are enforced by institutions such as government agencies, judicial courts, and the police (Hartley, Rabe, & Champion, 2018). The other difference between the two controls is the type of society in which they are applied. As informal control is applied in small and rural communities, formal control mechanisms are applied in large urban societies. Ultimately, the two prospects differ on the nature of quality, with formal control showcasing the characteristics of being repressive, punitive, and imposed while informal control stays persuasive, integrative, and formative. Both types of controls can be employed either independently or interdependently, depending on the characteristics of societies.
Informal and formal control systems bear significant impacts on the legal system. Primarily, both types of controls form grounds in the definition of what is legal and what is not legal. In solving disputes, the legality or illegality of behaviors is assessed through the inputs of either control (Hartley, Rabe, & Champion, 2018). The two control systems also define the crime reporting mechanisms in societies. Individuals can assess criminal or deviant behaviors through formal or informal lenses and report them before they instill adverse impacts on individuals. In social control theory, there are indications that informal and formal control mechanisms can also cause deviance. That happens especially where there are disagreements between formal and informal control mechanisms. Put simply, understanding what is legal and what is illegal depends on the scope of inputs of both aspects of social control.
Stages of Evolution of Disputes
Disputes evolve through three stages, with each stage manifesting impacts on the formal criminal justice processes. The first stage is naming. The party recognizes injury at the naming stage. The party can also report a particular experience as injurious at the naming stage. In a formal legal system, naming constitutes why particular individuals have perpetrated some injury. Naming forms the basis of the pursuance of a legal suit. Blaming is the second stage in the evolution of disputes. In blaming, individual figures out that another party or individual is responsible for the injuries that he/she experiences. Empirically, naming may be the critical transformation. The level and kind of disputing in society may turn more on what is initially perceived as an injury than on any later decision.
The last stages of the evolution of a dispute are blaming and claiming. Blaming constitutes figuring out the responsible parties for specific injuries. By including fault within the definition of grievance, the definitions limit the concept to injuries viewed both as violations of norms and as remediable. The definition takes the grievant’s perspective: the injured person must feel wronged and believe that something might be done in response to the injury, however politically or sociologically improbable such a response might be (Chen, 2018). Claiming is the last phase of a dispute in which the individual with a grievance voices the issue to the individual who caused the injury. A claim is transformed into a dispute in a judicial process if it is accepted partially or rejected completely. The reactions to a claiming communication can trigger an escalation of the dispute or deceleration. Learning more about the existence, absence, or reversal of these basic transformations will increase our understanding of the disputing process and our ability to evaluate dispute processing institutions.
Law and Social Change
Law is an important mechanism in societal regulations. Most societies are characterized by contradictions and binaries ranging from social classes to ethnic diversities. Even in the most advanced places in societies, problems still arise on factors such as crime or inequality. In such situations, the law has been a factor of social change (Chen, 2018). There are landmark legislation and amendments that have been undertaken to ensure the realization of social change. In the U.S., the law has played a significant role in addressing various rights that bear significance to society’s structure, beliefs, and inputs. The Bill of Rights amendments stands as a testament to understanding the scope that the law can explore in influencing social order. Besides legislation, Supreme Court rulings have set precedents in addressing various social issues in American society. Cases such as Cooper v. Aaron (1958) or Engel v. Vitale (1962) instilled significant changes in the U.S. social setting. The legal system has also stayed steady in instilling various grievances in society into formal control settings, including the legal developments following the aftermath of civil unrests. The law formalizes social changes, be they from individual or collective inputs.
Substantive and Procedural Law
Substantive and procedural law are vital elements of contemporary law whose understanding can steer positive legal developments in society. Substantive law implies the application of the facts of individual cases or how to ascertain damage in individual cases. There is a demand to establish the rights and obligations that govern individuals and organizations in substantive law. Substantive law hence accommodates all the laws of general and specific applicability. Conversely, procedural law creates the legal rules by which substantive law is created, applied, and enforced. The application of procedural law is normally in the courts. In the confines of procedural law, the procedural law constitutes different processes through which a case proceeds. Based on the definitions above, it is understandable that procedural laws define the rules by which substantive laws are enforced. In the illustration, the substantive law explores whether an individual is competent enough to enter into a contract. However, the time when a party can sue another party is dealt with in procedural law.
There are significant differences between procedural law and substantive law beyond the definitions. The first element of difference is power, in which substantive laws have independent powers to de...