Overview
This page is an archive of the study materials I created while preparing for the law subject of the Degree-by-Self-Education exam.
The main portfolio essay focuses on why I studied law, how I approached it, and what changed in my perspective. This page is different. It is closer to a reference archive: a record of the actual notes I made while trying to understand the basic structure and language of law.
The notes are roughly 20 pages long. They were not written as professional legal commentary. They are personal study notes made to organize concepts, compare categories, and build a basic map of the field.
Purpose of the Notes
The goal was not to memorize every detail.
The goal was to stop seeing law as a vague and unfamiliar field. I wanted to understand the basic distinctions: what law is, how it differs from morality, how legal norms are structured, how constitutional law differs from civil law or criminal law, and how legal rules apply across time, people, and territory.
Because law contains many abstract concepts, I tried to organize the material in a structural way. Rather than simply copying definitions, I focused on relationships between concepts.
For example:
- law and morality
- social norms and legal norms
- mandatory rules and moral rules
- written law and unwritten law
- continental law and common law
- civil law and criminal law
- private law and public law
- substantive law and procedural law
- general principles and exceptions
- statutes, precedents, and interpretation
This helped me build a rough legal map before going into specific details.
Scope
The notes mainly cover the following areas.
Legal Theory
This section includes the most basic concepts of law.
I organized topics such as the meaning of law, legal norms, moral norms, social norms, coercive norms, legal validity, legal interpretation, legal systems, and the distinction between different types of law.
One of the interesting parts was comparing thinkers and ideas around law and morality. For example, I summarized concepts such as Hegel's common spirit, Radbruch's view of law as the reality of serving legal values, Jellinek's idea of law as the ethical minimum, and Schmoller's idea of law as the ethical maximum.
I also organized contrasts such as:
- law as external regulation versus morality as inner regulation
- rights and duties
- good and justice
- empirical and normative perspectives
- written rules and interpretive principles
This section was important because it gave me the vocabulary to understand later subjects.
Constitutional Law
The constitutional law section covers the nature of constitutions, constitutional history, state structure, fundamental rights, social rights, and constitutional institutions.
I paid particular attention to the abstractness of constitutional law. Unlike many ordinary rules, constitutional norms often require interpretation through principles, history, institutional design, and precedent.
This was where I became interested in topics such as the right of resistance, the role of the Constitutional Court, and the relationship between democracy, rights, and state power.
Civil Law
The civil law section covers basic principles, natural persons, legal persons, expression of intent, agency, property law, obligations, family law, inheritance, commercial law, and civil procedure.
Civil law was difficult because of the number of exceptions and detailed categories. At the same time, it was easier to connect to everyday life because many of its concepts appear in contracts, property, family relationships, and private disputes.
I used the notes to compare rules, exceptions, and judicial interpretations. Possession and related court reasoning were especially interesting because they showed how precise legal interpretation can become.
Criminal Law
The criminal law section covers the basic structure of crime and punishment.
I studied the principle of legality, crimes, attempts, impossibility, accomplices, penalties, and criminal procedure. Compared to civil law, criminal law felt stricter in its structure because it deals with the state's power to punish individuals.
The principle that there is no crime or punishment without law was especially memorable. It showed why clarity and restraint are so important in criminal law.
Administrative Law, Social Law, and International Law
The notes also include administrative law, social law, and international law.
Administrative law was personally less interesting, but it helped me understand how administrative actions, public officials, administrative contracts, and remedies are structured.
Social law was more accessible, especially labor law. I learned that employment and dismissal are not simply private decisions but are structured by legal standards.
International law was covered more lightly, but it helped me see how law operates beyond one state's domestic legal system.
How to Read These Notes
These notes are not meant to be read as a polished article.
They are closer to a map, index, and thinking trace. Some parts are compressed, some are written as keywords, and some are arranged as comparisons. The value of the material is not in elegant writing, but in showing how I organized an unfamiliar field into a structure I could understand.
The notes are useful for three purposes.
First, they show the actual study process behind the main portfolio essay.
Second, they serve as a personal reference for revisiting basic legal concepts.
Third, they can become source material for future short essays on specific topics, such as law and morality, the abstractness of constitutional law, the principle of legality, or the temporal and territorial effect of law.
Future Use
I do not plan to turn the entire 20-page document into a long series.
Instead, I see this archive as raw material. If a topic becomes interesting enough, I can later extract one focused essay from it.
Possible future topics include:
- How law differs from morality
- Why constitutional law feels abstract
- Why criminal law needs strict legality
- How legal rules apply across time and territory
- How civil law handles rights, obligations, and exceptions
For now, this page exists as a study archive: a compact record of how I built a basic legal framework from zero.