Rudolf von Jhering

“ I hold this view, which is to be met with not unfrequently in life, to be reprehensible in the highest degree, and in conflict with the very essence of law. If it were possible that this view should become general, all would be over with the law itself; since whereas the law, to exist, demands that there should be always a manly resistance made to wrong, those who advocate this view preach that the law should flee like a coward before wrong. ”

“ The rich man will, for the sake of peace, sacrifice the amount in controversy, which to him is insignificant; and the poor man, to whom this same amount is comparatively great, will sacrifice his peace for its sake. Thus would the question of the struggle for the principles of law reduce itself to a simple problem in arithmetic, in which advantage and disadvantage are weighed one against the other, by each side, and the decision thus reached. ”

“ An inner voice tells him that he should not retreat, that it is not the worthless object that is at stake but his own personality, his feeling of legal right, his self-respect—in short, the suit at law ceases to appear to him in the guise of a mere question of interest and becomes a question of character. ”

“ Whenever a person’s legal right is violated, he is placed face to face with the question, whether he will assert his right, resist his opponent—that is, engage in a struggle; or whether, in order to avoid this, he will leave right in the lurch. The decision of this question rests entirely with himself. Whatever his answer to the question may be, some sacrifice accompanies it in both cases. In the one case, the law is sacrificed to peace; in the other, peace is sacrificed to the law. ”

“ In respect to this end, the person whose rights have been invaded no longer weighs all the sacrifices and inconveniences which the suit at law draws after it—the end in his eyes is compensation for the means. It is not a mere money-interest which urges the person whose rights have been infringed to institute legal proceedings, but moral pain at the wrong which has been endured. ”

“ That is a matter of individual taste and temperament; one loves contention more, and the other peace; from the standpoint of law both conclusions are to be equally respected; for the law leaves to every one who has a legal right, the choice of asserting his right or of surrendering it. ”

“ If now, of all these forms, I choose the least violent, the legal struggle for individual rights in the form of an action at law, it is not because it has for jurists a higher interest than any other, but because, in a trial at law, the real nature of the case is most subject to the danger of being ignored both by jurists and the laity. ”

“ What signifies a square mile of barren land compared with a war which costs the lives of thousands, brings sorrow and misery into the palace and the hut, eats up millions and millions of the treasure of the state, and possibly imperils its existence? ”

“ Why fight; why not rather yield? The magnificence of the sight of the highest display of human strength and sacrifice irresistibly carries all of us along with it and lifts us to the height of ideal judgment. But, in the struggle for individual private rights, just mentioned, the case is very different. The relative smallness of the interests with which it is concerned—uniformly the question of mine and thine, the dull prosiness which uniformly attaches to this question—makes of this struggle, it would seem, simply a matter of cold calculation and sober contemplation ”

“ But experience teaches us none the less that many others in the same situation come to the very opposite decision—they like peace better than a legal right asserted at the cost of trouble and anxiety. ”

“ Every lawyer knows that the sure prospect of having to pay dearly for victory does not keep many persons from suing. How frequently it happens that the counselor who exposes to a client the badness of his case and dissuades him from suing receives for answer: Bring suit, cost what it may! ”

“ But we shall not need to conjure up a condition of things long past and vanished to discover from it the meaning of that which, even if different in form, is in essence the same to-day. A glance at the phenomena of our actual life and psychological self-observation will perform the same service for us. ”

“ He is not concerned simply with recovering the object—he may, perhaps, as frequently happens, to prove the real motive in suing, have devoted it from the first to a charitable institution—but with forcing a recognition of his rights. ”