Criptfiend got it.
Lawful doesnt mean your character will follow civil/societal laws and never break them. A lawful character can be lawful by adhering to a personal code of conduct from which he/she will never stray from, or by never disobeying orders from his master (IE his master's orders are the law he follows), it all depends on the character and on the context of things.
But yea, unless said wizard has a personal code of conduct that makes it completely ok to dominate old ladies and make them give away their stuff, its not really an action one would consider lawful in the general sense. Since there's not enough context given that would make that action lawful, we must interpret it using general ideas of what lawful is in D&D. And according to whats generally known and assumed in regards to D&D alignment, that sort of action is very common to neutral evil characters, and very unlawful in general.
One of the things people should try to learn when handling character development and alignment, is that not everything needs to adhere to D&D manual alignment stereotypes. Those things are just meant to be a general guideline to how a character of a certain alignment should behave, but you can totally be creative about it without straying from your alignment, as long as there is some context to back it up.
For example, lets say we made a DF style Elf character who's a lawful good fighter. Lets say he lived for most of his life in an isolated tribe deep in the woods. According to his tribe's warrior laws, anyone that harms trees/plants is worthy of death, and he must eat humanoids that he kills in combat, and they believe that, by eating their enemies, they're saving their souls from certain suffering, and thus this is a good act. To most people, these actions would be indicative of a very strange chaotic evil/neutral type character, but since he's doing it because he's faithful to his tribe's laws, its a both a lawful and good action, so technically, he's still a lawful good character.
Of course, these things all depends on context and your GM not being a huge dweeb that wont accept any character that isn't a 2 dimensional medieval fantasy stereotype.