An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law by Roscoe Pound (free novels to read .txt) 📕

It must be borne in mind that "nature" did not mean to antiquity what it means to us who are under the influence of the idea of evolution. To the Greek, it has been said, the natural apple was not the wild one from which our cultivated apple has been grown, but rather the golden apple of the Hesperides. The "natural" object was that which expressed most completely the idea of the thing. It was the perfect object. Hence the natural law was that which expressed perfectly the idea of law and a rule of natural law was one which expressed perfectly the idea of law applied to the subject in question; the one which gave to that subject its perfect development. For legal purposes reality was to be found in this ideal, perfect, natural law, and its organ was juristic reason. Legislation and the edict, so far as they had any more than a positive foundation of political authority, were but imperfect and ephemeral copies of this jural reality. Thus the jurists came to the doctrine of the ratio legis, the principle of natural law behind the legal rule, which has been so fruitful both of practical good and of theoretical confusion in interpretation. Thus also they came to the doctrine of reasoning from the analogy of all legal rules, whether traditional or legislative, since all, so far as they had jural reality, had it because and to the extent that they embodied or realized a principle of natural law.

Natural law was a philosophical theory for a period of growth. It arose to meet the exigencies of the stage of equity and natural law, one of the great creative periods of legal history. Yet, as we have seen, even the most rapid growth does not permit the lawyer to ignore the demand for stability. The theory of natural law was worked out as a means of growth, as a means of making a law of the world on the basis of the old strict law of the Roman city. But it was worked out also as a means of directing and organizing the growth of law so as to maintain the general security. It was the task of the jurists to build and shape the law on the basis of the old local materials so as to make it an instrument for satisfying the wants of a whole world while at the same time insuring uniformity and predictability. They did this by applying a new but known technique to the old materials. The technique was one of legal reason; but it was a legal reason identified with natural reason and worked out and applied under the influence of a philosophical ideal. The conception of natural law as something of which all positive law was but declaratory, as something by which actual rules were to be measured, to which so far as possible they were to be made to conform, by which new rules were to be framed and by which old rules were to be extended or restricted in their application, was a powerful instrument in the hands of the jurists and enabled them to proceed in their task of legal construction with assured confidence.

But the juristic empiricism by which the ius ciuile was made into a law of the world needed something more than a theoretical incentive. It was a process of analogical development by extension here and restriction there, of generalization, first in the form of maxims and later by laying down broad principles, and of cautious striking out of new paths, giving them course and direction by trial and error. It was a process very like that by which Anglo-American judicial empiricism has been able to make a law of the world on the basis of the legal precepts of seventeenth-century England. Such a process required something to give direction to juristic reasoning, to give definite content to the ideal, to provide a reasonably defined channel for juristic thought. This need was met by the philosophical theory of the nature of things and of the law of nature as conformity thereto. In practice jurist-made and judge-made law have been molded consciously, or unconsciously, by ideas as to what law is for; by theories as to the end of law. In the beginnings of law men had no more ambitious conception than a peaceable ordering of society at any cost. But the Greeks soon got a better conception of an orderly and peaceable maintaining of the social status quo. When the theory of natural law is applied to that conception, we get the notion of an ideal form of the social status quo—a form which expresses its nature, a perfect form of the social organization of a given civilization—as that which the legal order is to further and maintain. Thus judge and jurist obtain a guide which has served them well ever since. They are to measure all situations by an idealized form of the social order of the time and place and are so to shape the law as to make it maintain and further this ideal of the social status quo. We shall meet this idea in various forms throughout the subsequent history of the philosophy of law. It constitutes the permanent contribution of Rome to legal philosophy.

As soon as scientific legal development begins in the Middle Ages the law once more comes in contact with philosophy through the study of both in the universities. What was the need of the time which philosophy was called upon to satisfy? Following an era of anarchy and disunion and violence men desired order and organization and peace. They called for a philosophy that would bolster up authority and rationalize their desire to impose a legal yoke upon society. The period was one of transition from the primitive law of the Germanic peoples to a strict law, through reception of Roman law as authoritative legislation or through compilation of the Germanic customary law more or less after the Roman model, as in the north of France, or through declaration of the customary law in reported decisions of strong central courts, as in England. Thus it soon became a period of strict law. Scholastic philosophy, with its reliance upon dialectic development of authoritatively given premises, its faith in formal logic and its central problem of putting reason as a foundation under authority, responded exactly to these demands. It is no misnomer to style the commentators or post-glossators of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the "scholastic jurists." For it was in large part the philosophy that met the needs of the time so completely which enabled them to put the Roman law of Justinian in a form to be received and administered in the Europe of nine centuries later. While they made the gloss into law in place of the text and made many things over, as they had to be made over if they were to fit a wholly different social order, the method of dialectical development of absolute and unquestioned premises made it appear that nothing had been done but to develop the logical implications of an authoritative text. Men could receive the law of Bartolus so long as they believed it but the logical unfolding of the pre-existing content of the binding legislation of Justinian. It is interesting to note in Fortescue an application of this to the rules of the common law in its stage of strict law. He assumes that these rules are the principles of which he reads in the commentators on Aristotle and that they may be compared to the axioms of the geometrician. The time had not yet come to call rules or principles or axioms in question. The need was to rationalize men's desire to be governed by fixed rules and to reconcile, in appearance at least, the change and growth which are inevitable in all law with the need men felt of having a fixed, unchangeable, authoritative rule. The scholastic philosophy did notable service in these respects and, I venture to think, left as a permanent contribution to legal science the method of insuring certainty by logical development of the content of authoritatively defined conceptions.

On the breakdown of the feudal social organization, the rise of commerce and the era of discovery, colonization and exploitation of the natural resources of new continents, together with the rise of nations in place of loose congeries of vassal-held territories, called for a national law unified within the national domain. Starkey proposed codification to Henry VIII and Dumoulin urged harmonizing and unifying of French customary law with eventual codification. The Protestant jurist-theologians of the sixteenth century found a philosophical basis for satisfying these desires of the time in the divinely ordained state and in a natural law divorced from theology and resting solely upon reason, reflecting the boundless faith in reason which came in with the Renaissance. Thus each national jurist might work out his own interpretation of natural law by dint of his own reason, as each Christian might interpret the word of God for himself as his own reason and conscience showed the way. On the other hand, the Catholic jurists of the Counter-Reformation found a philosophical basis for satisfying these same desires in a conception of natural law as a system of limitations on human action expressing the nature of man, that is, the ideal of man as a rational creature, and of positive law as an ideal system expressing the nature of a unified state. For the moment these ideas were put at the service of a growing royal authority and bore fruit in the Byzantine theory of sovereignty which became classical in public law. In private law they soon took quite another turn. For a new period of growth, demanded by the expansion of society and the breaking over the bonds of authority, was at hand to make new and wholly different demands upon philosophy.

Glossators and commentators had made or shaped the law out of Roman materials for a static, locally self-sufficient, other-worldly society, revering authority because authority had saved it from what it feared, regarding chiefly the security of social institutions and negligent of the individual life because in its polity the individual lived his highest life in the life of another whose greatness was the greatness of those who served him. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries jurists were required to make or shape a law out of these medievalized Roman materials to satisfy the wants of an active and shifting, locally interdependent, this-worldly society, impatient of authority because authority stood in the way of what it desired, and jealously individualist, since it took free individual self-assertion to be the highest good. In England the strict law made for feudal England out of Germanic materials, sometimes superficially Romanized, was likewise to be made over to do the work of administering justice to a new world. A period of legal development resulted which is strikingly analogous to the classical period of Roman law. Once more philosophy took the helm. Once more there was an infusion into law of ideas from without the law. Once more law and morals were identified in juristic thinking. Once more men held as a living