This character is a Other Symbol and is commonly used, that is, in no specific script. The character is also known as legal term and jurisprudence.
The glyph is not a composition. It has no designated width in East Asian texts. In bidirectional text it acts as Other Neutral. When changing direction it is not mirrored. The word that U+2696 forms with similar adjacent characters prevents a line break inside it.
The CLDR project calls this character “balance scale” for use in screen reading software. It assigns these additional labels, e.g. for search in emoji pickers: balance, justice, Libra, scale, zodiac.
This character is designated as an emoji. It will be rendered as monochrome character on conforming platforms. To enable colorful emoji display, you can combine it with Variation Selector-16: ⚖️ See the Emojipedia for more details on this character’s emoji properties.
The Wikipedia has the following information about this codepoint:
A scale or balance is a device used to measure weight or mass. These are also known as mass scales, weight scales, mass balances, and weight balances.
The traditional scale consists of two plates or bowls suspended at equal distances from a fulcrum. One plate holds an object of unknown mass (or weight), while objects of known mass or weight, called weights, are added to the other plate until mechanical equilibrium is achieved and the plates level off, which happens when the masses on the two plates are equal. The perfect scale rests at neutral. A spring scale will make use of a spring of known stiffness to determine mass (or weight). Suspending a certain mass will extend the spring by a certain amount depending on the spring's stiffness (or spring constant). The heavier the object, the more the spring stretches, as described in Hooke's law. Other types of scales making use of different physical principles also exist.
Some scales can be calibrated to read in units of force (weight) such as newtons instead of units of mass such as kilograms. Scales and balances are widely used in commerce, as many products are sold and packaged by mass.