History and Law

By James Constant

Jurisprudence. Philosophy of Law. Uncertainty of Law and Constitutional Government. This book looks at History and Law: Jewish, Greek, Roman, English and American Law, the Bill of Rights and Corporate Pewrsonas

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Constant
• Release date: Oct 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301790067

James Constant

writes on law, government, mathematics and science, as they are and as they should be

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History and Law

By James Constant

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 1993,2013 by James Constant

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Table of Contents

Jewish Law

Greek and Roman Law

English and American Law

The Bill of Rights and Corporate Personas

HISTORY AND LAW

Before getting to the remaining subjects, it is probably instructive to give a brief history of lawyers and law. To begin with, law codes and records of lawsuits going back to 1,700 B.C., and for centuries thereafter in Mesopotamia and Egypt, show no lawyers. Parties to disputes had to plead their own cases. The courtroom was generally a public place where sat the judges who were mayors, councils of elders, priests, or the sovereign ruler himself. The plaintiff simply stepped up and stated his grievance and the defendant gave his reply. In the record of a trial held in Egypt in 1,375 B.C., the record reports what the plaintiff and defendant said. The famous judgment by Israel's King Solomon came after the parties had each argued their sides to him. [86].

Taxes probably should receive credit for being a motive to create written laws. The earliest known laws, Egyptian hieroglyphics from about 3,300 B.C., are about taxes. Prior to the Egyptian clay tablets, Summerian cuneiform cones, found near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, also spoke of taxes. The famous Rosetta stone, which unlocked the secrets of hieroglyphics with its Greek translation, also was about taxes. The modern 1040 form traces its ancestry back to the Egyptian and Summerian stones.

The Summerians, whose written code of laws dates back to 2,500 B.C., were probably the first to have a written code which goes beyond taxes. The Summerian Code was augmented and incorporated into the Hammurabi Code (1728 1686 B.C.), the most famous legal achievement of the ancient East. It proclaimed to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak but meted punishment according to class status and said nothing about the rights of people against the state. In this respect, the Hammurabi Code lacked the passion and justice of the later Mosaic laws. The Old Testament rejected the model of punishment that depended on the victim’s identity substituting the equal and proportional mandate of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. As a general rule, the Bible did not recognize class distinctions in punishment. The Justinian Code (528 A.D.) was the most famous legal achievement of the ancient West. It firmly established law as the law of will, the use of will alone to defend its truth. Its famous three precepts were: Everyone is to live honorably, respect the personality of others, and render to everyone else his own. The English Common Law followed a similar path. However, early in English history, punishment varied by status. The focus of the law was