Law is the totality of legal rules, principles and institutes that regulate relations in a certain social community. Law regulates relations between people, but also relations of people towards the social community in which they live and to whose rules they submit. The most important classification of right is: law in the objective sense (a set of legal norms) and law in the subjective sense (rights and obligations imposed by objective law). Law has the role of regulating the behavior of people in the social community. It regulates behavior of society by help of legal and moral norms, but since moral norms do not result in the application of coercion and legal sanctions, in this paper we analyzed legal norms and the way in which the state maintains order in society, that is influences society's behavior. Legal norm is a rule of conduct brought by the state or someone else under its authority. It consists of a hypothesis, a disposition, a delict and a sanction (it is not a mandatory part of a legal norm). Sanction is a threat that serves as a form of prevention so that violations of norms would not occur. The theories we have analyzed mention the importance of the primary and secondary classification of legal norms, each emphasizing which is more important and whether they can do without each other and whether the use of force is the most important part of the legal order, credited for its maintenance. Coercion is a possibility to achieve an act or omission of an act that we would not otherwise voluntarily want, but it should also be the last remedy to which a state-legal order resorts. If we do not respect certain legal norms prescribed to us, there is a sanction and possible use of coercion. In this paper, we connected the example of the coercion of the state government towards society due to the epidemic caused by the COVID-19 virus. In this emergency situation that threatens a large amount of the population, it has led us to the restriction of human rights and the use of various forms of coercion in order for people to respect the epidemiological measures adopted by states. In the beginning of the epidemic there were no specific sanctions or means of coercion to violate these measures, but as society didn't quite obey these measures, authorities began to change existing acts and also new legal regulations were introduced. At this point authorities should be careful that the application of criminal law legislation is not disproportionate and arbitrary. Use of criminal law should not be the primary instrument in repression against the epidemic, as the fear of prosecution can discourage citizens from honestly informing about their health and seeking health care, thus reducing the efforts of health authorities to detect contagious diseases early and to prevent their spread