No abstract

“Law in general,” says Montesquieu, “is human reason so far as it controls all the people of the earth, and the political and civil laws of each nation can only be considered as individual cases in which this human reason is applied.” Reason was held by the Romans to constitute one of the fundamental elements of law. Cicero announced the existence of “a veritable law, true reason (recta ratio), in conformity with nature, universal, immutable and eternal, the commands of which constitute a call to duty and the prohibitions of which avert evil.”It is at present unnecessary to consider what influence the Stoic, Academic and Epicurean doctrines had on Roman jurisprudence, and it would be risky to support as absolutely final any view which might be expressed on the subject. During the last phases of the Republic there had already come to exist in the world’s capital a fusion of the different schools of philosophy; and traces of the Platonic teachings constantly appear in the expression of the great orator’s lofty thought.

As a characteristic of contemporary civilization, history will doubtless point to the unceasing effort to establish on a solid basis the juridical organization of the world. The essential requisites are already at hand. Facility of communication, suppression of distances, the fact that the different regions are in constant communication, all of these things greatly facilitate the work. There are no longer undiscovered lands, or inaccessible countries. In the commercial and industrial world business organizations embrace all the nations of the earth. In the intellectual domain, an irresistible international movement has succeeded the narrow conceptions heretofore existing. It is especially in the domain of law that such manifestations have been shown and are still shown with an ever-increasing intensity. In the vast subject of the conflict of laws, an effort is being made to obtain uniform rules; in the subject of the law of nations not only have numerous conventions been concluded, some of which number as contracting parties practically all the states; but the application of justice has been organized, and, already, has gone beyond the phase of arbitration; there exists a true judicial court, a court which declares and decides law in its own right instead of depending upon the will of those amenable to its jurisdiction. Everything indicates that the time is close at hand when a legislative and an executive power will be established over the nations; at any rate, no one nowadays thinks of pronouncing such institutions impossible and fit to be classed with unrealizable dreams.

No abstract

Law is the whole of the rules which regulate the relations of men. At the commencement of civilization and, even at the present day, primitive peoples and nations not in a complete state of civilization have clothed these rules with supernatural attributes; they have been represented as having been imposed upon mankind by a supernatural power; they have been given the effect of magic formulas, which, it is to be supposed, result in the chastisement and punishment of those who violate their dictates. Following the development of humanity step by step, three separate domains of law have been marked out: private law, or the law of men in the character of individuals; public or political law, or law as applied to men in their capacity as members of the state; and finally, the law of nations or international law, in other words, the law of states.