Roscoe Pound

“ In primitive societies the answers are that the legal order exists simply to keep the peace, that men seek through the legal order to avert individual self-redress and prevent private war, and that the purpose of lawmaking is to establish rules by which controversies may be adjusted peaceably. ”

“ What do we seek to achieve through the political organization? What is the ultimate purpose in lawmaking, that is, in the selection and formulation of the standards for the public administration of justice which organized society establishes or recognizes? These are the first questions in legal and in political philosophy. The history of juristic thought and of political thought is chiefly a history of the way in which men have answered them. ”

“ What is there in personality that makes aggression an injury, and (2) what is it that makes anything one's own? The answer was sought in a theory of natural rights, or of certain qualities inherent in individual human beings and demonstrated by reason to which society, state, and law were bound to give effect. ”

“ In the nineteenth century, then, legal and political philosophers were agreed that the end of the legal order, the purpose of political organization and purpose of lawmaking, were to secure and maintain individual liberty. ”

“ But during the Middle Ages these conceptions gradually yielded to the classical idea of the legal order as a means of preserving the social status quo, the more since the latter was fortified by the unassailable authority of texts of scripture and of the Roman law. Moreover, from the thirteenth century on, philosophers more and more sought to sustain authority by reason, and in this way they prepared the way for a new conception which developed in the seventeenth century. ”

“ Accordingly, whereas to-day we seek, as we say, to do justice, seeking to preserve the peace and to adjust controversies peaceably simply as means thereto and incidents thereof, primitive legal systems make peace the end. ”