Lex

“ Law in the concrete is lex, loi, gesetz, legge. Law in the abstract is jus, droit, recht, diritto. It is not the case, indeed, that the distinction between these two sets of terms is always rigidly maintained, for we occasionally find the concrete word used in the abstract sense. Medieval Latin, for example, constantly uses lex as equivalent to jus, and the same usage is not uncommon in the case of the French loi. The fact remains, however, that the Continental languages possess, and in general make use of, a method of avoiding the ambiguity inherent in the single English term. ”

“ Lex,—to abide by the law, in spirit only if our inmost conviction warrants that course, but in letter absolutely where there is the smallest hint of doubt; secure in the knowledge that, however fallible it be, it is the best that man has yet been able to do in imitation of the immutable decrees of God. ”

“ The modern use of the term law, in the sense of physical or natural law, to indicate the uniformities of nature, is directly derived from this scholastic theory of the lex aeterna; but the theological conception of divine legislation on which it was originally based is now eliminated or disregarded. The relation between the physical law of inanimate nature and the moral or civil laws by which men are ruled has been reduced accordingly to one of remote analogy. ”

“ Blessed nature, healthy, temperate nature, abhors and exterminates excess. Human law in this matter imitates at a great distance her provisions; and we must strive to supplement the efforts of the law. Yes, boy, we must be a law to ourselves and for our neighbours—LEX ARMATA—armed, emphatic, tyrannous law. If you see a crapulous human ruin snuffing, dash from him his box! ”

“ But if, to these examples of the nation’s fondness for their laws, you add, what appears in the tenor of our histories, the constant language of the coronation-oaths, of the oaths of our judges, and, above all, of the several great charters; in all which express mention is made of the LEX TERRÆ, in opposition to every foreign, but especially the Cæsarean, law ”

“ If practice be the whole he is taught, practice must also be the whole he will ever know: if he be uninstructed in the elements and first principles upon which the rule of practice is founded, the least variation from established precedents will totally distract and bewilder him: ita lex scripta est [63] is the utmost his knowlege will arrive at; he must never aspire to form, and seldom expect to comprehend, any arguments drawn a priori, from the spirit of the laws and the natural foundations of justice. ”

“ This method implies the study of law upon both its statical and its progressive sides, and discloses the processes by which it has been developed. The disclosure of the motives and processes of legal development I regard as unquestionably the most valuable of the fruits of comparative jurisprudence, for just behind them lies that subtile lex legum which has eluded the grasp of so many imaginative system builders, but which is eventually destined to be as familiar learning to the scientific jurist as Grimm's law is to the modern philologer. ”

“ Any rule, not existing in the nature of things, or that is not permanent, universal and inflexible in its application, is no law, according to any correct definition of the term law. ”

“ Keep your nerve, Peter Manners told himself; it's only a job. But nerve has to rest on a sturdier foundation than cash reserves just above zero and eviction if he came away from this interview still unemployed. Clay, at the Association of Professional Engineers, who had set up the appointment, hadn't eased Peter's nervousness by admitting, "I don't know what in hell he's looking for. He's turned down every man we've sent him."
The interview was at three. Fifteen minutes to go. Coming early would betray overeagerness. Peter stood in front of the Lex Industries plant and studied it to kill time. ”

“ The Roman distinction between the Law of Persons and the Law of Things, which though extremely convenient is entirely artificial, has evidently done much to divert inquiry on the subject before us from the true direction. The lessons learned in discussing the Jus Personarum have been forgotten where the Jus Rerum is reached, and Property, Contract, and Delict, have been considered as if no hints concerning their original nature were to be gained from the facts ascertained respecting the original condition of Persons. ”

“ In the next place, it is well to take pains that the law one is advocating shall appear to depend on its own precise language; and that the law with a contrary sense should appear to be introduced with a doubtful interpretation, or by some ratiocination or definition, in order that that law which is expressed in plain language may appear to be the more solemn and efficient After that it will be well to add the meaning of the law which is on one's own side according to the strict letter of it ”

“ Modern law is a maze of verbiage; but law two centuries old is as clipped and trim as the trees in an old Dutch garden—not written in irritating black letter, but printed in plain, clear type, and its orthography only differs from our own in such minor points as old wine bottles do from new, affording just that conclusive evidence of age that is satisfactory. ”

“ The theory is still that of the Roman lawyers, for in the phantasmagoria with which the Natural Condition is peopled, every feature and characteristic eludes the mind except the simplicity and harmony which possessed such charms for the jurisconsult; but the theory is, as it were, turned upside down. It is not the Law of Nature, but the State of Nature, which is now the primary subject of contemplation. ”

“ We see that the term 'law' is a mere abstraction, under which laws of matter and of mind, the law of nature and the law of the land are included, and some of these uses of the word are confusing, because they introduce into one sphere of thought associations which belong to another ”

“ Fourth, law may be conceived as a philosophically discovered system of principles which express the nature of things, to which, therefore, man ought to conform his conduct. Such was the idea of the Roman jurisconsult, grafted, it is true, on the second and third ideas and on a political theory of law as the command of the Roman people, but reconciled with them by conceiving of tradition and recorded wisdom and command of the people as mere declarations or reflections of the philosophically ascertained principles, to be measured and shaped and interpreted and eked out thereby. ”

“ There is perhaps no more curious proof of the disorder which impatient and impertinent science is introducing into classical thought and language, than the title chosen by the Duke of Argyll for his interesting study of Natural History—'The Reign of Law.' Law cannot reign. ”

“ The mind, and spirit, and wisdom, and intentions of the city are all situated in the laws. As our bodies cannot, if deprived of the mind, so the state, if deprived of law, cannot use its separate parts, which are to it as its sinews, its blood, and its limbs. The ministers of the law are the magistrates; the interpreters of the law are the judges; lastly, we are all servants of the laws, for the very purpose of being able to be freemen. What is the reason, O Naso, why you sit in that place? 147What is the power by which those judges, invested with such dignity, are separated from you? ”

“ For the concrete development of beautifully bewigged humanity, called a lawyer, I beg you to observe that I always express, and feel, extreme respect. But for Law itself, in the existent form of it, invented, as it appears to me, only for the torment and taxation of Humanity, I entertain none whatsoever. ”

“ Νόμος is used in a very wide sense to include any human institution, anything established or received among men, whether by way of custom, opinion, convention, law or otherwise. It was contrasted, at least in the language of the philosophers, with φύσις, or nature. That which is natural is το φυσικόν; that which is artificial, owing its origin to the art and invention of mankind, is τὸ νομικόν. It is often said that the earliest meaning of νόμος is custom. ”

“ The true and perspicuous explication of the Elements of Laws, Natural and Politic, which is my present scope, dependeth upon the knowledge of what is human nature, what is a body politic, and what it is we call a law. ”

“ You will be able likewise so to discover the joy and satisfaction arising from the knowledge of the law, since you may easily perceive how much our ancestors, in sagacity, excelled the rest of the world, if you please to compare their system of laws with those of Lycurgus, Draco, and Solon. ”

“ Like all other deductions from the hypothesis of a Law Natural, and like the belief itself in a Law of Nature, it was languidly assented to and suffered to have little influence on opinion and practice until it passed out of the possession of the lawyers into that of the literary men of the eighteenth century and of the public which sat at their feet. ”

“ Again, tenth, men have thought of law as a [Pg 66] system of principles, discovered philosophically and developed in detail by juristic writing and judicial decision, whereby the external life of man is measured by reason, or in another phase, whereby the will of the individual in action is harmonized with those of his fellow men. ”

“ It will also be suitable for him whose argument takes its stand on the letter of the law, to urge that laws ought to be looked at, not with reference to the advantage of that man who has violated them, but according to their own intrinsic value, and that nothing ought to be considered more precious than the laws. ”

“ For when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them; in the day when God shall judge the secrets of men, according to my gospel, by Jesus Christ. ”

“ The very conception of a set of principles, invested with a higher sacredness than those of the original law and demanding application independently of the consent of any external body belongs to a much more advanced stage of thought than that to which legal fictions originally suggested themselves. ”

“ It is wisely ordered, therefore, that the principles and axioms of law, which are general propositions flowing from abstracted reason, and not accommodated to times or men, should be deposited in the breasts of the judges, to be occasionally applied to such facts as come properly ascertained before them. ”

“ A true law enjoins on all the citizens indifferently a number of acts similar in class or kind; and this is exactly the feature of a law which has most deeply impressed itself on the popular mind, causing the term "law" to be applied to mere uniformities, successions, and similitudes. ”

“ Even to consider ideas of more importance than things; especially the idea of beauty. You will remember that in speaking of Raphael’s Allegory of Jurisprudence, we said that Jurisprudence represented an abstract idea: the conception of what justice is in itself and of the qualities of Prudence, Firmness, and Temperance that it involves, apart from the machinery for making and administering the law. Men make laws, and{236} some are good and some are bad. Even the good ones are not always perfectly administered. ”

“ I answer that, Since law is the art, as it were, of directing or ordering the life of man, as in every art there is a distinct division in the rules of art, so, in every law, there must be a distinct division of precepts: else the law would be rendered useless by confusion. We must therefore say that the judicial precepts of the Old Law, whereby men were directed in their relations to one another, are subject to division according to the divers ways in which man is directed. ”

“ If we turn to the ideas which have obtained in conscious thinking about the end of law, we may recognize three which have held the ground successively in legal history and a fourth which is beginning to assert itself. ”

“ In the formation of the law, regard should be often had to the convenience, to the faculties, to the interests, and to the habits of the citizens, sometimes even to their prejudices, but in the interpretation of it, nothing but justice should be regarded. ”

“ Seventh, law has been thought of as a reflection of the divine reason governing the universe; a reflection of that part which determines the "ought" addressed by that reason to human beings as moral entities, in distinction from the "must" which it addresses to the rest of creation. ”

“ We are certain, that the law will operate this effect, because the lawgiver is, by supposition, divine. He, who knew what was in man, what his nature, and true interest, is, could not mistake in adapting the law to the subject of it. ”

“ The tales are, at any rate, certainly tales; while the law is not a law. A law implies that we know the nature of the generalisation and enactment; not merely that we have noticed some of the effects. ”

“ Every one of them is skilled in their law; for, as it is a very short study, so the plainest meaning of which words are capable is always the sense of their laws; and they argue thus: all laws are promulgated for this end, that every man may know his duty ”

“ Jurisprudence corresponds to physiology, Morality to psychology. The laws of reason regarding jurisprudence and moral theory, when transformed into natural laws, give the principles of physiology and psychology. ”

“ What kind of a legist is he who declaims when he ought to reason, who continually mistakes his metaphors for legal axioms, and who does not so much as know how to obtain a universal by induction, and form a category? ”

“ 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 tenet that all positive law was declaratory of natural law and got its real authority from the rules of natural law which it declared. ”