law unto oneself

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   One who is free from the constraints of law or rules.

   • If you take away the Law, all things will fall into a Confuſion, every Man will become a law unto himſelf; which, in the depraved Condition of Human Nature, muſt needs produce many great Enormities.
   • The noiseless leaping forward of the canoe beneath him heightened his sense of breaking with the past and hastening onward into another life. In that life he would be a new creature, free to be a law unto himself.
   • The king, of course, was regarded as the central focus of traditional English institutions. By no means should he rule arbitrarily, nor was he a law unto himself.
2. 2

   One who flouts the law or conventional wisdom

   One who flouts the law or conventional wisdom; one who ignores rules or logic to behave according to his or her own standards.

   • "I've made up my mind. I'm going to do dairy work, and it's not a bit of good your trying to talk me out of it!" [...] Dilys had always been more or less a law unto herself.
3. 3

   One who is lawful in the absence of an enforced law

   One who is lawful in the absence of an enforced law; one who behaves with integrity.

   • For when the Gentiles which haue not the Law, doe by nature the things contained in the Law: theſe hauing not the Law, are a Law vnto themſelues.
   • So is man, who is made in his image, a law unto himself; and it is because man is made in his image that God proposes to him the very same end as a ground of obligation which He himself recognizes.

The neighborhood

• neighborscofflaw
• neighbortake the law into one's own hands