Sunday is more like Monday than it used to be. Places of business that used 1o keep daytime "business hours" are now open late into the night. And on the Internet, the hour of the day and the day of the week have become irrelevant (无关的). A half century ago in the United States, most people experienced strong and precise dividing lines between days of rest and days of work, school time and summer time. Today the boundaries still exist, but they seem not clear.
The law in almost all states used to require stores to close on Sunday; in most, it no longer does. It used to keep the schools open in all seasons except summer; in most, it still does. And whether the work week should strengthen its legal limits, or whether it should become more "flexible," is often debated. How should we, as a society, organize our time? Should we go even further in relaxing the boundaries of time until we live in a world in which every minute is much like every other?
These are not easy questions even to ask. Part of the difficulty is that we rarely recognize the "law of time" even when we meet it face to face. We know as children that we have to attend school a certain number of hours, days and years but unless we meet the truant officer(学监) , we may well think that we should go to school due to social custom and parents' demand rather than to the law. As adults we are familiar with "extra pay for overtime working," but less familiar with the fact that what makes up "overtime" is a matter of legal definition (法律规定). When we turn the clock forward to start daylight-saving time, have we ever thought to ourselves: Here is the law in action? As we shall see, there is a lot of law that has great influence on how to organize and use time: compulsory education law, overtime law, and daylight-saving law as well as law about Sunday closing, holidays, being late to work, time zones, and so on. Once we begin to look for it, we will have no trouble finding a law of time to examine and rate.
