1
/
of
1
Leila's Books
The Struggle For Law
The Struggle For Law
Regular price
$1.99 USD
Regular price
Sale price
$1.99 USD
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Quantity
Couldn't load pickup availability
Scanned, proofed and corrected from the original edition for your reading pleasure.It is also searchable and contains hyper-links to chapters.
***
Rudolph von Jhering died in Goettingen in the fall of 1892. Jhering was at the time of his death the most profound student of law that the world had known. Savigny treated the law as a jurisprudence of concepts. He treated it from a purely subjective point of view. Windscheid denned rights from the point of view of the protection of the will. Jhering rejected the will as the central factor, and set up a jurisprudence of facts against Savigny's jurisprudence of concepts. Windscheid's view, logically developed, is an individualistic, unhistorical and formal conception of the law. Jhering formulated his notions of interests in the "Geist," which enabled him to reach the conception of the "Zweck,"or purpose of legal principles. If rights are legally protected interests, it therefore follows that the state must select what interests it regards as most worthy of protection, which leads logically to the question of making inquiry of purpose in the law, which Jhering stated in the form of the principle, "the object is the creator of the law." On this stairway of three steps Jhering built his theory of the Law, and invested the law with a positive social function. During the last forty years of his life he saw the reactionary conservatism of the Historical School of Savigny supplanted by the epoch of legislation and socialization of the law (as pointed out above) which marks the most significant development of the law in modern times,—the change from the individual to the social emphasis.
Jhering in his work "The Struggle for Law" says at p. 2, respecting the origin of Law:
Law is an uninterrupted labor, and not of the state power only, but of the entire people.
The entire life of the law, embraced in one glance, presents us with the same spectacle of restless striving and working of a whole nation, afforded by its activity in the domain of economic and intellectual production. Every individual placed in a position in which he is compelled to defend his legal rights takes ( part in this work of the nation, and contributes his mite towards the realization of the idea of law on earth.
Jhering then develops these conceptions by endeavoring to show that:
"The Life of the Law is a Struggle;"
"The Struggle for his Rights a Duty of the Person whose Rights have been violated, to himself;"
"The Assertion of one's Rights a Duty to Society;"
"The Importance of the Struggle for Law to National Life."
During the forty-four years since Jhering published this work, the world has grown more in industrial development and in the accumulation and concentration of vast wealth than it did during the two thousand years preceding. To-day there are employed 5,000, 10,000, 25,000, persons in one factory, and even 200,000 by one employer. One machine running automatically for months without stopping, attended by a dozen men, will produce 80,000 pint bottles in one day of twenty-four hours at a cost of less than 8 cents per gross, the labor for which formerly cost $1.35.7
Little could Jhering conceive of his Fatherland raiding, deporting, and enslaving the people of Belgium (19141916) in violation of every principle for which he contends in his "Der Kampf urn's Recht." Little could he conceive of almost the entire population of the Eastern Hemisphere locked in the death struggle for the control of commerce and raw materials of the world, sacrificing tens of millions of the picked male population of twenty nations!
He could not conceive of bread and meat tickets for 135,000,000 of people, of thousands of war planes, of zeppelins
throwing tons of dynamite on London, hundreds of submarine battleships and merchantmen, and the entire economic existence of six nations of Europe regulated by statute!
There was much truth in Jhering's conclusions, and still is, developed in his Struggle for Law, but much less now under vastly different economic and industrial conditions. When Jhering wrote this address he could not have foreseen the centralization of trade, credit, industry, and vast populations which have during the last forty years revolutionized the world. In ancient society individual rights were submerged in the activities of the group. The person has never received as high a degree of protection from the law as has the claims of property. When Jhering wrote this lecture the Historical School had reached the summit of its influence, and with it the rights of individual persons had reached their highest degree of development in an evolution of many centuries. If anything may be safely prophesied of the immediate future, one may perhaps say with (Tagore) that the individual, who is one of many thousands, performing a single operation with great speed...
***
Rudolph von Jhering died in Goettingen in the fall of 1892. Jhering was at the time of his death the most profound student of law that the world had known. Savigny treated the law as a jurisprudence of concepts. He treated it from a purely subjective point of view. Windscheid denned rights from the point of view of the protection of the will. Jhering rejected the will as the central factor, and set up a jurisprudence of facts against Savigny's jurisprudence of concepts. Windscheid's view, logically developed, is an individualistic, unhistorical and formal conception of the law. Jhering formulated his notions of interests in the "Geist," which enabled him to reach the conception of the "Zweck,"or purpose of legal principles. If rights are legally protected interests, it therefore follows that the state must select what interests it regards as most worthy of protection, which leads logically to the question of making inquiry of purpose in the law, which Jhering stated in the form of the principle, "the object is the creator of the law." On this stairway of three steps Jhering built his theory of the Law, and invested the law with a positive social function. During the last forty years of his life he saw the reactionary conservatism of the Historical School of Savigny supplanted by the epoch of legislation and socialization of the law (as pointed out above) which marks the most significant development of the law in modern times,—the change from the individual to the social emphasis.
Jhering in his work "The Struggle for Law" says at p. 2, respecting the origin of Law:
Law is an uninterrupted labor, and not of the state power only, but of the entire people.
The entire life of the law, embraced in one glance, presents us with the same spectacle of restless striving and working of a whole nation, afforded by its activity in the domain of economic and intellectual production. Every individual placed in a position in which he is compelled to defend his legal rights takes ( part in this work of the nation, and contributes his mite towards the realization of the idea of law on earth.
Jhering then develops these conceptions by endeavoring to show that:
"The Life of the Law is a Struggle;"
"The Struggle for his Rights a Duty of the Person whose Rights have been violated, to himself;"
"The Assertion of one's Rights a Duty to Society;"
"The Importance of the Struggle for Law to National Life."
During the forty-four years since Jhering published this work, the world has grown more in industrial development and in the accumulation and concentration of vast wealth than it did during the two thousand years preceding. To-day there are employed 5,000, 10,000, 25,000, persons in one factory, and even 200,000 by one employer. One machine running automatically for months without stopping, attended by a dozen men, will produce 80,000 pint bottles in one day of twenty-four hours at a cost of less than 8 cents per gross, the labor for which formerly cost $1.35.7
Little could Jhering conceive of his Fatherland raiding, deporting, and enslaving the people of Belgium (19141916) in violation of every principle for which he contends in his "Der Kampf urn's Recht." Little could he conceive of almost the entire population of the Eastern Hemisphere locked in the death struggle for the control of commerce and raw materials of the world, sacrificing tens of millions of the picked male population of twenty nations!
He could not conceive of bread and meat tickets for 135,000,000 of people, of thousands of war planes, of zeppelins
throwing tons of dynamite on London, hundreds of submarine battleships and merchantmen, and the entire economic existence of six nations of Europe regulated by statute!
There was much truth in Jhering's conclusions, and still is, developed in his Struggle for Law, but much less now under vastly different economic and industrial conditions. When Jhering wrote this address he could not have foreseen the centralization of trade, credit, industry, and vast populations which have during the last forty years revolutionized the world. In ancient society individual rights were submerged in the activities of the group. The person has never received as high a degree of protection from the law as has the claims of property. When Jhering wrote this lecture the Historical School had reached the summit of its influence, and with it the rights of individual persons had reached their highest degree of development in an evolution of many centuries. If anything may be safely prophesied of the immediate future, one may perhaps say with (Tagore) that the individual, who is one of many thousands, performing a single operation with great speed...
Share
