Frank wrote on Mar 3
rd, 2022 at 5:50pm:
"Sovereign individuality" explained to Chinese shills.
And hopefully also to people who hate war and poverty, let's read on:
Quote:Common law and custom are features of most enduring legal orders. In English law the concepts have taken on special and interrelated significance, since English law is said to be grounded in common law and that in turn is said to derive from custom. According to classical common law theory, which crystallized in the seventeenth century, common law grew from the customs of the English people. It was not made by legal officials, as statutes are. Change was accommodated in this theory, on the basis not of identity of elements of law over time but of continuity, a continuity of authority and reception of legal customs, and of the traditional legal order which declared them to be law. The role of legal officials – particularly judges – was to interpret and declare legal custom; their judgments provided evidence of it. They did not make it or invent it. This mode of development through continual interpretation and reinterpretation of the significance and bearing of the legal inheritance was, according to common lawyers, better adapted to social complexity, change and variety, and also to human epistemological and practical limitations, than attempts to cover any field with legislation.
Thanks for the exposition on "common law".
Quote:This theory was largely eclipsed in nineteenth-century England by the theory of legal positivism, and with it were eclipsed for a time some useful insights into social complexity and institutional limitations.
And, pray, why did this happen? Did it have anything to do with coal-mine owners tolerating children working in coal-mines instead of receiving an education, because their fathers were paid below-living wages?
So in fact the "common lawers" ended up sentencing children to transportation if the children stole a loaf of bread. Sick fools they were, toads of the property owners.
Quote:Also lost was a sense of the complex dialectic between continuity and change in legal and institutionalized traditions.
Of course, 'common law' was not sufficient to deal with the complex relationships engendered by the industrial revolution.
Quote:Maybe, but at its worst
common law failed miserably to take account of complex economic relations. Dickens and Hugo exposed the consequences in excruciating detail.