“Capito,” said Marcellus, “is a liar; for, Caesar, thou canst give the Roman citizenship to men, but not to words.” The mere impulse of a single mind, even that of a Roman emperor, however, probably counts for little more in law than it does in language. Even in language one powerful intellect or one influential academy may, by its own decree, give a bent to modes of speech which they would not otherwise have taken. But whether law or language be conventional or natural is really an obsolete question, and the difference between historical and natural sciences in the last result is one of names.
The application of the historical method to law has not resulted in anything like the discoveries which have made comparative philology a science. There is no Grimm’s law for jurisprudence; but something has been done in that direction by the discovery of the analogous processes and principles which underlie legal systems having no external resemblance to each other. But the historical method has been applied with special success to a single system—the Roman law. The Roman law presents itself to the historical student in two different aspects. It is, regarded as the law of the Roman Republic and Empire, a system whose history can be traced throughout a great part of its duration with certainty, and in parts with great detail. It is, moreover, a body of rationalized legal principles which may be considered apart from the state system in which they were developed, and which have, in fact, entered into the jurisprudence of the whole of modern Europe on the strength of their own abstract authority—so much so that the continued existence of the civil law, after the fall of the Empire, is entitled to be considered one of the first discoveries of the historical method. Alike, therefore, in its original history, as the law of the Roman state, and as the source from which the fundamental principles of modern laws have been taken, the Roman law presented the most obvious and attractive subject of historical study. An immense impulse was given to the history of Roman law by the discovery of the Institutes of Gaius in 1816. A complete view of Roman law, as it existed three centuries and a half before Justinian, was then obtained, and as the later Institutes were, in point of form, a recension of those of Gaius, the comparison of the two stages in legal history was at once easy and fruitful. Moreover, Gaius dealt with antiquities of the law which had become obsolete in the time of Justinian, and were passed over by him without notice.
Nowhere did Roman law in its modern aspect give a stronger impulse to the study of legal history than in Germany. The historical school of German jurists led the reaction of national sentiment against the proposals for a general code made by Thibaut. They were accused by their opponents of setting up the law of past times as intrinsically entitled to be observed, and they were no doubt strongly inspired by reverence for customs and traditions. Through the examination of their own customary laws, and through the elimination and separate study of the Roman element therein, they were led to form general views of the history of legal principles. In the hands of Savigny, the greatest master of the school, the historical theory was developed into a universal philosophy of law, covering the ground which we should assign separately to jurisprudence, analytical and historical, and to theories of legislation. There is not in Savigny’s system the faintest approach to the Austinian analysis. The range of it is not the analysis of law as a command, but that of a Rechtsverhältniss or legal relation. Far from regarding law as the creation of the will of individuals, he maintains it to be the natural outcome of the consciousness of the people, like their social habits or their language. And he assimilates changes in law to changes in language. “As in the life of individual men no moment of complete stillness is experienced, but a constant organic development, such also is the case in the life of nations, and in every individual element in which this collective life consists; so we find in language a constant formation and development, and in the same way in law.” German jurisprudence is darkened by metaphysical thought, and weakened, as we believe, by defective analysis of positive law. But its conception of laws is exceedingly favourable to the growth of a historical philosophy, the results of which have a value of their own, apart altogether from the character of the first principles. Such, for instance, is Savigny’s famous examination of the law of possession.
There is only one other system of law which is worthy of being placed by the side of Roman law, and that is the law of England. No other European system can be compared with that which is the origin and substratum of them all; but England, as it happens, is isolated in jurisprudence. She has solved her legal problems for herself. Whatever element of Roman law may exist in the English system has come in, whether by conscious adaptation or otherwise, ab extra; it is not of the essence of the system, nor does it form a large portion of the system. And, while English law is thus historically independent of Roman law, it is in all respects worthy of being associated with it on its own merits. Its originality, or, if the phrase be preferred, its peculiarity, is not more remarkable than the intellectual qualities which have gone to its formation—the ingenuity, the rigid logic, the reasonableness, of the generations of lawyers and judges who have built it up. This may seem extravagant praise for a legal system, the faults of which are and always have been matter of daily complaint, but it would be endorsed by all unprejudiced students. What men complain of is the practical hardship and inconvenience of some rule or process of law. They know, for example, that the law of real property is exceedingly complicated, and that, among other things, it makes the conveyance of land expensive. But the technical law of real property, which rests to this day on ideas that have been buried for centuries, has nevertheless the qualities we have named. So too with the law of procedure as it existed under the “science” of special pleading. The greatest practical law reformer, and the severest critic of existing systems that has ever appeared in any age or country, Jeremy Bentham, has admitted this: “Confused, indeterminate, inadequate, ill-adapted, and inconsistent as to a vast extent the provision or no provision would be found to be that has been made by it for the various cases that have happened to present themselves for decision, yet in the character of a repository of such cases it affords, for the manufactory of real law, a stock of materials which is beyond all price. Traverse the whole continent of Europe, ransack all the libraries belonging to all the jurisprudential systems of the several political states, add the contents together, you would not be able to compose a collection of cases equal in variety, in amplitude, in clearness of statement—in a word, all points taken together, in constructiveness—to that which may be seen to be afforded by the collection of English reports of adjudged cases” (Bentham’s Works, iv. 460). On the other hand, the fortunes of English jurisprudence are not unworthy of comparison even with the catholic position of Roman law. In the United States of America, in India, and in the vast Colonial Empire, the common law of England constitutes most of the legal system in actual use, or is gradually being superimposed upon it. It would hardly be too much to say that English law of indigenous growth, and Roman law, between them govern the legal relations of the whole civilized world. Nor has the influence of the former on the intellectual habits and the ideas of men been much if at all inferior. Those who set any store by the analytical jurisprudence of the school of Austin will be glad to acknowledge that it is pure outcome of English law. Sir Henry Maine associated its rise with the activity of modern legislatures, which is of course a characteristic of the societies in which English laws prevail. And it would not be difficult to show that the germs of Austin’s principles are to be found in legal writers who never dreamed of analysing a law. It is certainly remarkable, at all events, that the acceptance of Austin’s system is as yet confined strictly to the domain of English law. Maine found no trace of its being even known to the jurists of the Continent, and it would appear that it has been equally without influence in Scotland, which, like the continent of Europe, is essentially Roman in the fundamental elements of its jurisprudence.
The substance of the above article is repeated from Professor E. Robertson’s (Lord Lochee’s) article “Law,” in the 9th ed. of this work.
