GRE issue寫作素材：法律

　　It is possible to pass laws that control or place limits on people's behavior, but legislation cannot reform human nature. Laws cannot change what is in people's hearts and minds.

　　通過(guò)法律可以控制或者限制人們的行為，但是立法是無(wú)法改變?nèi)祟惐拘缘?。法律無(wú)法改變?nèi)藗兊母星楹退枷搿?/p>

　　正文：

　　Ever since the Code of Hammurapi comes into being, laws have begun to put restrictions on people's behaviors and have played an important role in the maintenance of social order. But aside from its impact on shaping public deportment, legislation is of no avail to reform human nature as well as mankind thoughts.

　　Our collective life experience is that we make choices and decisions every day--under a legal system. No one is ever granted the rights to surpass the boundary of laws; otherwise there may be lack of protection for private property and personal right from being violated. Common sense tells us that the laws will punish the wrongdoers severely sometimes so harshly even to sentence the felons to death. It is the awe to controlling authority as well as the fear of castigation that made most of the people away from the illicit behaviors. Laws, for better or worse, have put up a paradigm on which people abide by, for the sake of personal interests and the social stability as well.

　　Laws can exert their influences on people’s “hands and legs”, but when it comes to man’s hearts and minds, it cannot. In the long history of its development, laws change over time and vary from region to region not to alter human nature but to be flexible enough to take account of various circumstances, times and places. The end of a legal system impels laws to evolve to keep pace with changing mores, customers, and our collective sense of equity but with little concern for the reconstruction of human thoughts. Bigamy, to be commonly regarded as illegal in most countries, is yet legitimate in some Arabian countries. For Islamic, outlawing bigamy seems an impinge upon their religious freedom of choosing mates. Instead of bringing about a revolution in the conception of marriage among Islamic disciples, laws give way to the entrenched customers. Still more, from the psychotic analysis angle, that laws will change nature is further doubted. Sigmund Freud has divided the individual personality into threefold: the id, the ego and the super ego. The ego, as the surface of the nature and the part you show the world, is governed by the "reality principle," otherwise known as laws.

　　However, so powerless are laws to extend its impacts on the id and the superego remains below, each has its own significant effects on the personality. A rapist, for example, despite years of imprisonment may still relapse into outrages in that laws fail to civilize the id desires composing of instinctual drives. By no means can laws alone alter our nature. Were laws by itself be able to cause a change in the human nature and exercise a fundamental influence on people's hearts and minds, then it would probably be no need for its existence. People at no time can ever have imagined this.

　　In fact, to truly change the human nature, it is through the synergic efforts associating the education, moral and ethic social interactions altogether that brought about a reconstruction of human nature.

　　In conclusion, in spite the fact that we may live in a harmonious society with the implementation of the laws, it seems unthinkable for laws to undertake the role as a reformer in rebuilding man's nature as well as hearts and minds.