In law and ethics, universal law or universal principle refers to concepts of legal legitimacy actions, whereby those principles and rules for governing human beings' conduct which are most universal in their acceptability, their applicability, translation, and philosophical basis, are therefore considered to be most legitimate.
Cognition, experiences and intuition are the starting points of legal thought, which has to be seen through the glasses of universality and abstractness. Notwithstanding this assumption, "legal principles 1) do not contain only logic and reason and that 2) they can be different in different situations despite their equal naming. The legal rules can be identical in different legal orders while they carry different wants".[1]
On one side "universality, abstraction, and theory itself are defined in a way that undermines the perspectives of some while privileging the perspectives of others"; on the other side, "the aspiration to universality itself may stand in the way of its realization if it seals off from view the bias built into legal norms, public practices, and established institutions".[2]
One type of Universal Law is the Law of Logic which prohibits logical contradictions known as sophistry. The Law of Logic is based upon the universal idea that logic is defined as that which is not illogical and that which is illogical is that which involves a logical contradiction, such as attempting to assert that an apple and no apple can exist at and in the same time and in the same place and attempting to assert that A and not-A can exist at and in the same time and in the same place.