I don't. At least never for certain. I'm speaking less of the professional and technical question of what is the law applicable to a particular issue, than of the question what 'law' really is, as such(per se).
It takes a moment to realise that one does not really know what the law is. There are hints of how nebulous the concept can be throughout our culture. Oliver Wendell Holmes famously spoke of the law as a 'brooding omnipresence.' All very well--but brooding like what? A hen, warming her eggs? A thoughtful and frustrated Achilles in the Titian painting, sitting on the beach and looking over a cloudy sky and stormy sea? Something otherwise somehow sitting above us all?
Or try this: the laws in the officially published statute books are not the law; they are merely evidence of what the law is. So where is this law, and how do we find it? Do we search biblically, looking at the skies above and the earth beneath, and find it perhaps ultimately in our hearts?
Surely not. The inclination of the heart of Man is evil from his youth. You might find evil in me, but it will be much harder to find...law. Jeremiah spoke of a time when the law would be inscribed on our hearts--meaning, presumably that in a New Epoch people would behave rightly without having to consult guides outside themselves.
Could the law be--in the Foucauldian sense--an archive, that is a somehow socially constructed body of knowledge, the self-creating repository of infinite sources of knowledge, or assumed knowledge, or myth or falsehood. All these are social items for consideration and inclusion. Take them together, all together, and you have a kind of presence which is shared out among all of us, all members of a society which is in some way governed by the law, and can be found by a search in the archives, both written in the conventional sense, and written in our hearts.
Everything, after all, can be found in Plato.
