An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law by Roscoe Pound (book club books TXT) 📖

We know Greek law from the beginnings of a legal order as pictured in the Homeric poems to the developed commercial institutions of the Hellenistic period. In its first stage the kings decide particular causes by divine inspiration. In a second stage the customary course of decision has become a tradition possessed by an oligarchy. Later, popular demand for publication results in a body of enactment. At first enactments are no more than declaratory. But it was an easy step from publication of established custom to publication of changes as if they were established custom and thus to conscious and avowed changes and intentional new rules through legislation. The law of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. was a codified tradition eked out by legislation and individualized in its application through administration of justice by large popular assemblies. Thus in spite of formal reduction to writing it preserved the fluidity of primitive law and was able to afford a philosophy for Roman law in its stage of equity and natural law—another period of legal fluidity. The development of a strict law out of codified primitive materials, which in Rome happily preceded the stage of equity and natural law, did not take place in the Greek city. Hence the rules of law were applied with an individualized equity that reminds us of the French droit coutumier—a mode of application which, with all its good points, must be preceded by a body of strict law, well worked out and well understood, if its results are to be compatible with the general security in a complex social order. In Athens of the classical period the word νόμος, meaning both custom and enacted law as well as law in general, reflected the uncertainty with respect to form and the want of uniformity in application, which are characteristic of primitive law, and invited thought as to the reality behind such confusion.

We may understand the materials upon which Greek philosophers were working if we look at an exhortation addressed by Demosthenes to an Athenian jury. Men ought to obey the law, he said, for four reasons: because laws were prescribed by God, because they were a tradition taught by wise men who knew the good old customs, because they were deductions from an eternal and immutable moral code and because they were agreements of men with each other binding them because of a moral duty to keep their promises. It was not long since that men had thought of legal precepts as divinely revealed, nor was it long since that law had been a tradition of old customs of decision. Philosophers were seeking a better basis for them in eternal principles of right. In the meantime in political theory, at least, many of them were the agreements of Athenian citizens as to how they should conduct themselves in the inevitable clashes of interests in everyday life. What was needed above all was some theory of the authority of law which should impose bonds of reason upon those who enacted, upon those who applied and upon those who were subject to law in such an amorphous legal order.

A sure basis of authority resting upon something more stable than human will and the power of those who govern to impose their will for the time being was required also for the problem of social control in the Greek city-state. In order to maintain the general security and the security of social institutions amid a strife of factions in a society organized on the basis of kinship and against the wilfulness of masterful individuals boasting descent from gods, in order to persuade or coerce both the aristocracy and the mass of the low born to maintain in orderly fashion the social status quo, it would not do to tell them that law was a gift of God, nor that what offended the aristocrat as a radical bit of popular legislation enacted at the instance of a demagogue was yet to be obeyed because it had been so taught by wise men who knew the good old customs, nor that Demos chafing under some item of a class-possessed tradition was bound by it as something to which all citizens had agreed. The exigencies of the social order called for a distinction between νόμος and τα νομιζόμενα—between law and rules of law. The Minos, which if not actually a dialogue of Plato's seems clearly Platonic and very close to Plato in time, is taken up with this distinction and gives us a clue to the juristic problems of the time.

Another example may be seen in Aristotle's well-known discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is significant that Greek thinkers always couple custom and enactment; things which today we contrast. These were the formal bases of legal authority. So Aristotle considers, not natural law and positive law, but what is just in itself—just by nature or just in its idea—and what derives its sole title to be just from convention or enactment. The latter, he says, can be just only with respect to those things which by nature are indifferent. Thus when a newly reconstituted city took a living Spartan general for its eponymus, no one was bound by nature to sacrifice to Brasidas as to an ancestor, but he was bound by enactment and after all the matter was one of convention, which, in a society framed on the model of an organized kindred, required that the citizens have a common heroic ancestor, and was morally indifferent. The distinction was handed down to modern legal science by Thomas Aquinas, was embodied in Anglo-American legal thought by Blackstone, and has become staple. But it is quite out of its setting as a doctrine of mala prohibita and mala in se. An example of the distinction between law and rules of law has become the basis of an arbitrary line between the traditionally anti-social, penalized by the common law, and recently penalized infringements of newly or partially recognized social interests. Although the discrimination between what is just and right by nature and what is just because of custom or enactment has had a long and fruitful history in philosophical jurisprudence and is still a force in the administration of justice, I suspect that the permanent contribution of Greek philosophy of law is to be found rather in the distinction between law and rules of law, which lies behind it and has significance for all stages of legal development.

Roman lawyers came in contact with philosophy in the transition from the strict law to the stage of equity and natural law, and the contact had much to do with enabling them to make the transition. From a purely legal standpoint Greek law was in the stage of primitive law. Law and morals were still largely undifferentiated. Hence Greek philosophical thinking of a stage of undifferentiated law and morals lent itself to the identification of the legal and the moral in juristic thinking which was characteristic of the classical Roman law. But the strict law obviously was indifferent to morals and in many vital points was quite at variance with the moral ideas of the time. The Greek distinction of just by nature and just by convention or enactment was suggested at once by such a situation. Moreover the forms of law at the end of the Republic and at the beginning of the Empire invited a theory of law as something composite, made up of more than one type of precept and resting immediately on more than one basis of authority.

Cicero enumerates seven forms of law. Three of these are not heard of thereafter in Roman juristic writing. Evidently already in Cicero's time they belonged to the past and had ceased to be effective forms of the actual law. The four remaining, namely, statutes, resolutions of the senate, edicts of the magistrates, and the authority of those learned in the law, come to three—legislation, administrative edicts, and juristic reasoning on the basis of the legal tradition. And these correspond to the three elements which made up the law. First, there was the ius ciuile: the Twelve Tables, subsequent legislation, interpretation of both, and the traditional law of the city. Second, there was the mass of rules, in form largely procedural, which was contained in the edicts. The growing point of the law had been here and to some extent growth was still going on through this means. Indeed this part of the law reached its final form under Hadrian. Third, there were the writings of the jurisconsults. The growing point of the law had begun to be here and this was the most important form of law in the classical period from Augustus to the third century. This part of the law got its final form in the Digest of Justinian. Of the three elements, the first was thought of originally as declared and published custom. Later it was thought of as resting on the authority of the state. It was obviously local and peculiar to Rome. In form it rested on the legislative power of the Roman people, supplemented by a mere interpretation of the legislative command with only the authority of customary acceptance. In Greek phrase it rested on convention and enactment. The second purported to be the rules observed by civilized peoples, and on points of commercial law may well have been an approximation thereto. Apart from this, however, according to ancient ideas of personal law, the rules which obtained among civilized peoples were eminently a proper law to apply between citizen and non-citizen. In Greek phrase it was law by convention. The basis of the third was simply reason. The jurisconsult had no legislative power and no imperium. The authority of his responsum, as soon as law ceased to be a class tradition, was to be found in its intrinsic reasonableness; in the appeal which it made to the reason and sense of justice of the iudex. In Greek phrase, if it was law, it was law by nature.

As the rise of professional lawyers, the shifting of the growing point of law to juristic writing and the transition from the law of a city to a law of the world called for a legal science, there was need of a theory of what law was that could give a rational account of the threefold body of rules in point of origin and authority, which were actually in operation, and would at the same time enable the jurists to shape the existing body of legal precepts by reason so as to make it possible for them to serve as law for the whole world. The perennial problem of preserving stability and admitting of change was presented in an acute form. Above all the period from Augustus to the second quarter of the third century was one of growth. But it was revolutionary only if we compare the law at the end of the period with the law of the generation before Cicero. The jurisconsults were practical lawyers and the paramount interest in the general security was ever before their eyes. While as an ideal they identified law with morals, they did not cease to observe the strict law where it was applicable nor to develop its precepts by analogy according to the known traditional technique when new phases of old questions came before them. Hence what to the Greeks was a distinction between right by nature and right by convention or enactment became to them a