T. E. Holland disapproves of the prominence given by Austin to this distinction, instead of that between public and private law. This, according to Holland, is based on the public or private character of the persons with whom the right is connected, public persons being the state or its delegates. Austin, holding that the state cannot be said to have legal rights or duties, recognizes no such distinction. The term “public law” he confines strictly to that portion of the law which is concerned with political conditions, and which ought not to be opposed to the rest of the law, but “ought to be inserted in the law of persons as one of the limbs or members of that supplemental department.”
Lastly, following Austin, the main division of the law of things is into (1) primary rights with primary relative duties, (2) sanctioning rights with sanctioning duties (relative or absolute). The former exist, as it has been put, for their own sake, the latter for the sake of the former. Rights and duties arise from facts and events; and facts or events which are violations of rights and duties are delicts or injuries. Rights and duties which arise from delicts are remedial or sanctioning, their object being to prevent the violation of rights which do not arise from delicts.
There is much to be said for Frederic Harrison’s view (first expressed in the Fortnightly Review, vol. xxxi.), that the rearrangement of English law on the basis of a scientific classification, whether Austin’s or any other, would not result in advantages at all compensating for its difficulties. If anything like a real code were to be attempted, the scientific classification would be the best; but in the absence of that, and indeed in the absence of any habit on the part of English lawyers of studying the system as a whole, the arrangement of facts does not very much matter. It is essential, however, to the abstract study of the principles of law. Scientific arrangement might also be observed with advantage in treatises affecting to give a view of the whole law, especially those which are meant for educational rather than professional uses. As an example of the practical application of a scientific system of classification to a complete body of law, we may point to W. A. Hunter’s elaborate Exposition of Roman Law (1876).
It is impossible to present the conclusions of historical jurisprudence in anything like the same shape as those which we have been discussing. Under the heading [Jurisprudence, Comparative], an account will be found of the method and results of what is practically a new science. The inquiry is in that stage which is indicated in one way by describing it as a philosophy. It resembles, and is indeed only part of, the study which is described as the philosophy of history. Its chief interest has been in the light which it has thrown upon rules of law and legal institutions which had been and are generally contemplated as positive facts merely, without reference to their history, or have been associated historically with principles and institutions not really connected with them.
The historical treatment of law displaces some very remarkable misconceptions. Peculiarities and anomalies abound in every legal system; and, as soon as laws become the special study of a professional class, some mode of explaining or reconciling them will be resorted to. One of the prehistorical ways of philosophizing about law was to account for what wanted explanation by some theory about the origin of technical words. This implied some previous study of words and their history, and is an instance of the deep-seated and persistent tendency of the human mind to identify names with the things they represent. The Institutes of Justinian abound in explanations, founded on a supposed derivation of some leading term. Testamentum, we are told, ex eo appellatur quod testatio mentis est. A testament was no doubt, in effect, a declaration of intention on the part of the testator when this was written. But the -mentum is a mere termination, and has nothing to do with mens at all. The history of testaments, which, it may be noted incidentally, has been developed with conspicuous success, gives a totally different meaning to the institution from that which was expressed by this fanciful derivation. So the perplexing subject of possessio was supposed in some way to be explained by the derivation from pono and sedeo—quasi sedibus positio. Posthumi was supposed to be a compound of post and humus. These examples belong to the class of rationalizing derivations with which students of philosophy are familiar. Their characteristic is that they are suggested by some prominent feature of the thing as it then appeared to observers—which feature thereupon becomes identified with the essence of the thing at all times and places.
Another prehistorical mode of explaining law may be described as metaphysical. It conceives of a rule or principle of law as existing by virtue of some more general rule or principle in the nature of things. Thus, in the English law of inheritance, until the passing of the Inheritance Act 1833, an estate belonging to a deceased intestate would pass to his uncle or aunt, to the exclusion of his father or other lineal ancestor. This anomaly from an early time excited the curiosity of lawyers, and the explanation accepted in the time of Bracton was that it was an example of the general law of nature: “Descendit itaque jus quasi ponderosum quid cadens deorsum recta linea vel transversali, et nunquam reascendit ea via qua descendit.” It has been suggested that the “rule really results from the associations involved in the word descent.” It seems more likely, however, that these associations explained rather than that they suggested the rule—that the omission of the lineal ancestor existed in custom before it was discovered to be in harmony with the law of nature. It would imply more influence than the reasoning of lawyers is likely to have exercised over the development of law at that time to believe that a purely artificial inference of this kind should have established so very remarkable a rule. However that may be, the explanation is typical of a way of looking at law which was common enough before the dawn of the historical method. Minds capable of reasoning in this way were, if possible, farther removed from the conceptions implied in the reasoning of the analytical jurists than they were from the historical method itself. In this connexion it may be noticed that the great work of Blackstone marks an era in the development of legal ideas in England. It was not merely the first, as it still remains the only, adequate attempt to expound the leading principles of the whole body of law, but it was distinctly inspired by a rationalizing method. Blackstone tried not merely to express but to illustrate legal rules, and he had a keen sense of the value of historical illustrations. He worked of course with the materials at his command. His manner and his work are obnoxious alike to the modern jurist and to the modern historian. He is accused by the one of perverting history, and by the other of confusing the law. But his scheme is a great advance on anything that had been attempted before; and, if his work has been prolific in popular fallacies, at all events it enriched English literature by a conspectus of the law, in which the logical connexion of its principles inter se, and its relations to historical facts, were distinctly if erroneously recognized.
While the historical method has superseded the verbal and metaphysical explanation of legal principles, it had apparently, in some cases, come into conflict with the conclusions of the analytical school. The difference between the two systems comes out most conspicuously in relation to customs. There is an unavoidable break in the analytical method between societies in which rules are backed by regulated physical force and those in which no such force exists. At what point in its development a given society passes into the condition of “an independent political society” it may not be easy to determine, for the evidence is obscure and conflicting. To the historical jurist there is no such breach. The rule which in one stage of society is a law, in another merely a rule of “positive morality,” is the same thing to him throughout. By the Irish Land Act 1881 the Ulster custom of tenant-right and other analogous customs were legalized. For the purposes of analytical jurisprudence there is no need to go beyond the act of parliament. The laws known as the Ulster custom are laws solely in virtue of the sovereign government. Between the law as it now is and the custom as it existed before the act there is all the difference in the world. To the historical jurist no such separation is possible. His account of the law would not only be incomplete without embracing the precedent custom, but the act which made the custom law is only one of the facts, and by no means the most significant or important, in the history of its development. An exactly parallel case is the legalization in England of that customary tenant-right known as copyhold. It is to the historical jurist exactly the same thing as the legalization of the Ulster tenant right. In the one case a practice was made law by formal legislation, and in the other without formal legislation. And there can be very little doubt that in an earlier stage of society, when formal legislation had not become the rule, the custom would have been legalized relatively much sooner than it actually was.
Customs then are the same thing as laws to the historical jurist, and his business is to trace the influences under which they have grown up, flourished and decayed, their dependence on the intellectual and moral conditions of society at different times, and their reaction upon them. The recognized science—and such it may now be considered to be—with which historical, or more properly comparative, jurisprudence has most analogy is the science of language. Laws and customs are to the one what words are to the other, and each separate municipal system has its analogue in a language. Legal systems are related together like languages and dialects, and the investigation in both cases brings us back at last to the meagre and obscure records of savage custom and speech. A great master of the science of language (Max Müller) has indeed distinguished it from jurisprudence, as belonging to a totally different class of sciences. “It is perfectly true,” he says, “that if language be the work of man in the same sense in which a statue, or a temple, or a poem, or a law are properly called the works of man, the science of language would have to be classed as an historical science. We should have a history of language as we have a history of art, of poetry and of jurisprudence; but we could not claim for it a place side by side with the various branches of natural history.” Whatever be the proper position of either philology or jurisprudence in relation to the natural sciences, it would not be difficult to show that laws and customs on the whole are equally independent of the efforts of individual human wills—which appears to be what is meant by language not being the work of man. The most complete acceptance of Austin’s theory that law everywhere and always is the command of the sovereign does not involve any withdrawal of laws from the domain of natural science, does not in the least interfere with the scientific study of their affinities and relationships. Max Müller elsewhere illustrates his conception of the different relations of words and laws to the individual will by the story of the emperor Tiberius, who was reproved for a grammatical mistake by Marcellus, whereupon Capito, another grammarian, observed that, if what the emperor said was not good Latin, it would soon be so. “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.