Two innocent truisms about the law lie behind much of the difficulty we have in understanding the relations between law and morality. The law can be valuable, but it can also be the source of much evil. Not everyone agrees to these truisms, and there is nothing inappropriate in challenging them, or examining their credentials. They are, however, truisms in being taken by most people to be obviously true and beyond question. In other words, they express many people's direct reactions to or understanding of the phenomena, an understanding which is open to theoretical challenge, but has to be taken as correct absent a successful theoretical challenge. There is no conflict between the truisms. People and much else in the world can be the source of both good and evil. Trouble begins when we ask ourselves whether it is entirely contingent whether the law is the source of good or ill in various societies, or how much good and how much evil there is in it. There has, of course, been enthusiastic and persisting support for claiming that the connection between law and morality is not contingent. The support comes from contradictory directions. Some strands in political anarchism claim that it is of the essence of law to have features which render it inconsistent with morality. Hence the law is essentially immoral. A clear example of this in recent times has been Robert Paul Wolff s argument that the law in its nature requires obedience regardless of one's judgement about the merit of the obeying conduct, and that this is inconsistent with people's moral autonomy which requires them to take responsibility for their actions and to act only on their own judgement on the merit of their actions. Diametrically opposed to this variant of anarchism is, e.g., a variety of Thomist natural law views which regard the law as good in its very nature.
J. Raz (Wed,) studied this question.