[515]. Leviathan, ch. 20. Eng. Works, III. 194.
[516]. I. 263.
[517]. The distinction between de jure or legal and de facto or practical sovereignty—sovereign power in law and sovereign power in fact—is admirably expressed and analysed in Bryce’s Studies in History and Jurisprudence II., pp. 49–73.
[518]. Fragment on Government, ch. 4. sects. 35, 36.
[519]. We have already seen that the state may and does owe legal duties to its subjects, but that these duties are necessarily imperfect and unenforceable. Supra, § 79.
[520]. For authorities, see § 57.
[521]. As to the possibility of legal limitations of sovereign power, see Jellinek, Das Recht des modernen Staates, I. pp. 432–441; Pollock, Jurisprudence, pp. 270–273; Sidgwick, Elements of Politics, pp. 23–29; 623–638; Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, II. 71. “Legal sovereignty,” says Dr. Bryce, “may be limited, i.e. the law of any given state may not have allotted to any one person or body, or to all the persons or bodies taken together, who enjoys or enjoy supreme legislative or executive power, the right to legislate or to issue special orders on every subject whatever.” Brown, Austinian Theory of Law, pp. 158–164. “The Austinian position,” says Professor Brown, “that a supreme legislature is incapable of legal limitation, is a position which does not rest, as Austin supposes, upon logical necessities, but upon the humbler ground of expediency.”
[522]. No small part of this branch of the law of status, however, may be conveniently dealt with in connexion with various departments of the law of property and obligations. It may be best, for example, to discuss the contractual capacity of different classes of persons in the law of contracts, instead of in the law of the personal status of these persons.
[523]. Blackstone, however, is sufficiently scrupulous in respect of logical arrangement to include them in this department of the law.