This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Law is the systematic study and interpretation of the rules a body, a state or a religious institution alike, uses to govern conduct, property and membership, its method comparing a body's stated rules and precedent against its own case history. It received an academic home in 1088, when law began to be taught as a formal university subject at Bologna under Irnerius, establishing legal study as a discipline pursued through systematic teaching and interpretation rather than through practice alone. It is classified among the social sciences.
For an atlas of religion and belief, law matters because a religious institution governs its own membership under codified rules exactly as a state governs its citizens, through canon, ordinance or a school of religious law's own jurisprudence, and the discipline's method of comparing a body's stated rule against its own precedent applies to that governance as readily as to civil law. Its own canon-law branch, already covered elsewhere as its own discipline, studies how a religious body governs its membership and discipline under its own codified law specifically.
That shared method is why the field matters here. A tradition's legal code, whether a monastic rule, a book of precepts or a body of religious jurisprudence, is a systematic instrument of governance in exactly the sense law as a discipline studies, and law supplies the comparative method for reading how consistently, and how it has changed, over that code's own history.