The Struggle for Law
do not intend to question the technical necessity of this view, but it should not keep us from acknowledging the correctness of the opposed view, which places the law on the same level with concrete legal right, and sees in the imperiling of the latter the imperiling of the former also. To the unprejudiced feeling of right, the latter view, it seems to me, must commend itself much more strongly than the former. The best proof of what I here allege is the expression which the Germans employ, and which was used in the Latin. In a case at law, the plaintiff is said in Germany to invoke the law (das Gesetz anrufen); the Romans called the complaint legis actio. The law itself is called in question; it is the law itself which is under discussion in a particular case—a view of the highest importance for the understanding of the old Roman process, legis actio. Hence the struggle for one’s legal rights is, at the same time, a struggle for the law. There is question not alone of a personal interest, of a single relation in which the law has been
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