Law and Morals Activity

This resource requires students to work in pairs or groups to consider which circle each behaviour fits into - Morally wrong (blue circle) or Illegal (red circle). The students should find this task difficult as there are several behaviours which could be in both. This is your chance to introduce the students to the relationship between law and morals, specifically the idea that a Venn diagram would be a more suitable method of categorising the behaviours and link it to Sir John Salmond’s idea of two intersecting circles. You could ask the students to create a list of behaviours they struggled to place in the middle of the two circles and identify these as examples of primary law’.

Behaviours include (but are not limited to): Murder, cheating in a game, downloading movies illegally, killing an animal for food, spitting, cannabis use.

You will need to print the resource and laminate the 3 A3 pages then cut out the behaviours and the two circles.