The Struggle for Law
there is question of a purely objective wrong, is only a question of interest; and a legal right according to the definition which I have given of it myself,[1] is nothing but an interest protected by the law. But in the presence of arbitrariness which lifts its hand against the law, this material consideration loses all value, for the blow which it aims at my legal right, strikes my person also when it strikes the law.
It is a matter of indifference what the object of the right is. If mere chance were to put me in possession of an object, I might be deprived of it without any injury to my person, but it is not chance, but my will, which establishes a bond between myself and it, and even my will only at the price of the past labor of myself or of another;—it is a part of my own strength and of my own past, or of the strength and past of another, which I possess and assert in it. In making it my own, I stamped it with the mark of my own person; whoever attacks it, attacks me; the
- ↑ “Geist des römischen Rechts” iii, p. 60.
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