The Unity of the Positive Law

In what sense is it meaningful to identify discrete laws?

Today, the health care bill passed. What does it mean for the bill to pass? All the institutional mechanisms are already in place: what additional work does a few men in a room raising and lowering their hands add? More deeply, why did I just identify the pertinent act as a room full of Congressmen?

Here's another way of asking the same question. How do we identify discrete laws? Is the law against speeding THAT law, or the law requiring the policeman to pull me over, or the authorizing bill to let the prosecutor prosecute me? Or what about the whole social framework that provides the funding and impetus for the system itself?

Rather, doesn't it make more sense to find these pragmatic distinctions formally meaningless? Isn't there nothing but the State, and the Law, the legal system, undifferentiated, complete, and claiming authority over the sum total of human behavior?

And aren't these distinctions, these identifications, the normative distinctions just that--- ethical / political / moral and profoundly bound up with notions of the POINT of the whole system?