Black and Fuller offer rival definitions of law as government control versus rule governance

Evidence

When people think about law or talk about law, what they usually have in mind is the official legal system—​that is, the system run by the government, the one we pay taxes to support. Many definitions of law make this concept explicit: Donald Black, as we have said, has defined law as governmental social control. … But there are other ways to define law, and some of these are broader than Black’s definition. The legal scholar Lon Fuller once defined law as “the enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules.” Of course, the government is very much in the business of subjecting behavior to rules (or trying to), but it is not the only entity playing this game. Fuller deliberately framed his definition in such a way that it was not limited to official rules—​rules put out by the government. He simply said “rules.” If we take his definition at face value, the government has no monopoly on law, in this or any society. — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law, 120

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes Black’s governmental-social-control definition from Fuller’s broader subjection-of-conduct-to-rules definition.
• XREF: Feeds the polyad’s legal-systems vocabulary: the official/institutional definition the rest of this book presumes versus Fuller’s pluralist alternative.