: provisions respecting Procedure have a double aspect a purely formal aspect, so far as they give regularity and method to the enforcement of sanctioning rights; and a material aspect, so far as certain stages of procedure (e. g. litis contestatio and res judicata) operate like Dispositions or any other Titles to modify the substantive rights of the contending parties. Procedure, then, is treated of in these Institutions partly indeed in its formal character, but still more in its material character, i. e. so far as its incidents can be regarded as belonging to the substantive code. It is more difficult to determine the principle of the other division, the relation of the law of Persons to the law of Things. They both deal with the rights and duties of persons in the ordinary modern acceptation of the word; why then, we may inquire, are certain rights and duties of persons separated from the rest and dealt with under the distinguishing category of jura personarum? It is not enough to say with Austin that the law of Things is the universal or general portion of the law, the law of Persons a particular and exceptional branch; that it is treated separately on account of no essential or characteristic difference, but merely because it is commodious to treat separately what is special and exceptional from what is general and universal. This answer furnishes no positive character of the law of Persons, but only the negative character of anomaly, i. e. of unlikeness to the larger portion of the law; but it would be difficult to show that the law of Persons is more exceptional, anomalous, eccentric, than the Civil dispositions as opposed to the Natural or Gentile dispositions of the law of Things. We must look to the details of the law of Persons, and observe whether its dispositions have any common character as contrasted with the dispositions of the law of Things. The law of Persons, in other words, the law of Status, classifies men as slaves and free, as citizens (privileged) and aliens (unprivileged), as paterfamilias (superior) and filiusfamilias (dependent). The law of Things looks at men as playing the parts of contractors or of neighbouring proprietors; in other words, the law of Persons considers men as UNEQUALS, the law of Things considers them as EQUALS: the one may be defined as the law of relations of inequality, the other as the law of relations of equality. It may induce us to believe that the law of unequal relations and the law of equal relations is a fundamental division of the general code, if we consider how essential are the ideas of equality and inequality to the fundamental conception of law. If we ventured on a Platonic myth, we might say that Zeus, wishing to confer the greatest possible gift on the human race, took the most opposite and uncombinable things in the universe, Equality and Inequality, and, welding them together indissolubly, called the product by the name of political society or positive law. The assumption will hardly be controverted, that in the relations of subject to subject, Positive law, like Ethical law, recognizes, as an ideal at least, the identity of the just (lawful) with the equal. Inequality, however, is no less essentially involved in positive law. We have seen that there is no right and no duty by positive law without a legislator and sovereign to whom the person owing the duty is in subjection. On the one side weakness, on the other irresistible power. Positive rights and duties, then, imply both the relation of subject to subject, and the relation of subject to sovereign or wielder of the sanction, in other words, both the relation of equal to equal, and the relation of unequal to unequal. It is the more surprising that Austin should apparently have failed to seize with precision this conception of the law of Persons, as he makes the remark, in which the whole truth seems implicitly contained, that the bulk of the law of Persons composes the Public, Political, or Constitutional code (jus publicum). Political society or government essentially implies subordination. It implies, on the one hand, sovereign power reposing in various legislative bodies, distributed, delegated, and vested in various corporations, magistrates, judges, and other functionaries; on the other hand, private persons or subjects subordinate to the sovereign power and to its delegates and ministers. The different forms of government are so many forms of subordination, so many relations of superior and inferior, that is, so many relations of unequals. Public law, then, is a law of Status, and the law of Persons or law of Status in the private code is the intrusion of a portion of the public code into the private code; or, in barbarous and semi-civilized legislations, the disfigurement of private law by the introduction of relations that properly belong to public law. For instance, the most salient institution of the ancient Roman law of Persons, the power of life and death over wife and child that vested in the father of the household, was the concession to a subject of an attribute that properly belongs to the sovereign or a public functionary. Another institution, slavery, placed one subject over another in the position of despotic sovereign. The relation of civis to peregrinus, so far as any rights at all were accorded to peregrinus, may be conjectured to have originally been that of patronus to cliens, that is to say, of political superior to political inferior. Government or positive law has usually commenced in the invasion by the stronger of the (moral) rights of the weaker; but so necessary is inequality to equality, or subordination to coordination, that the (moral) crimes of ancient conquerors are regarded with less aversion by philosophic historians, as being the indispensable antecedents of subsequent civilization. The beginnings, then, of positive law have been universally the less legitimate form of inequality, inequality between subject and subject, leaving its traces in dispositions of the civil code: but the advance of civilization is the gradual elimination of inequality from the law, until little remains but that between magistrate and private person, or sovereign and subject. Modern society has advanced so far on the path of equalization, in the recognition of all men as equal before the law, that the distinctions of status, as they existed in the Roman law of persons, are almost obliterated from the private code. Slavery has vanished; parental and marital power are of the mildest form; civilized countries accord the same rights to cives and peregrini; guardians (tutores) in modern jurisprudence, as in the later period of Roman law, are considered as discharging a public function, and accordingly the relation of guardian and ward may be regarded as a portion of the public code. Having been led to mention Public or Constitutional law, it may aid to clear our conceptions if we observe that some of its dispositions are necessarily, and by the nature of the case, deficient in the characters of Positive law. It is rigorously true to say that the powers of subordinate political functionaries are a status. They imply rights and duties on the part of superior and inferior, enforced by appeal to the common sovereign. But, when tracing the hierarchy of government, we come to the top of the scale; when we speak of the limitations of the sovereign power, we have passed from the sphere of Positive law. The sovereign is free from the fetters of positive law; he has no legal obligations, for they would imply a superior. Like a private individual who sets an ethical law to himself, the sovereign is not constrained to observe constitutional law by aught that resembles a positive sanction. The existence of a law to bind the sovereign being assumed, the sove reign, the author of the law, can abrogate it at pleasure. Like the Aeschylean Jove, παρ' ἑαυτῷ τὸ δίκαιον ἔχων, “with his own fingers warping law, ἰδίοις νόμοις Ζεὺς ἀθέτως κρατύνει, “ with self-set law the sovereign 'sways uncontrolled;' or in the words of another poet, ἡ πόλις ἐβούλεθ', ᾗ νόμων οὐδὲν μέλει, ‘such the state's plea sure, whom no law restrains.' Nor has the sovereign any rights like those of a subject by positive law; and this absence of protection by positive sanctions may be expressed by the aphorism— the sovereign's might is his right. The sovereign body, of course, cannot emancipate itself from the law of prudence, nor from the ethical law, nor from the divine law, but these are the only laws from which it is not emancipated. Constitutional law cannot be enforced against the sovereign body by any but moral sanctions. Whereas, then, the law of Persons that belongs to private law is just as much positive law as the law of Things, and political functionaries who exercise a delegated power fall under a positive law of Persons, the absolute sovereign is not invested with legal status. When it approaches the limitations of the sovereign Constitutional law changes its character, it ceases to be positive law, and becomes a law of opinion; or, in other words, public law, so far as it relates to the sovereign, is not properly law, but only a collection of ethical maxims. In speaking of Constitutional law as a law of status, we must be understood as using the language of theoretical jurisprudence, not of Roman law: the classical jurists use the term status to denote exclusively relations of private persons, denoting by the status of civitas the rights, political or civil, of the private citizen, not the political attributes of the magistrate. Before we terminate our general remarks on the nature of status, it is necessary to distinguish from the law of Persons a department of law with which, in consequence of a verbal ambiguity, it is sometimes confounded. Blackstone deserves credit for having recognized Public law as a part of the law of Persons; but he also included under the law of Persons that department of primary rights to which belong the right of free locomotion, the right of using the bodily organs, the right to health, the right to reputation, and other rights which perhaps more commonly emerge in the redress meted out for their violation, that is, in the corresponding sanctioning rights, the right of redress for bodily violence, for false imprisonment, for bodily injury, for defamation, and the like. These, however, are not the special and exceptional rights of certain eminently privileged classes, but the ordinary rights of all the community, at least of all who live under the protection of the law; they belong to filiusfamilias as well as to paterfamilias, to peregrinus and latinus as well as to civis. The rights in question, that is to say, do not belong to the law of unequal rights, or the law of Persons, but to the law of equal rights, or the law of Things. The anomalous institution of slavery, however, furnishes a ground for controverting this arrangement; for, as by this legalized iniquity of ancient law, the slave, living as he did, not so much under the protection as under the oppression of the law, was denuded of all the rights of humanity, including those of which we speak, we cannot say that these rights belong to servus as well as to liber. The same, however, may be said of contract rights and rights of ownership, for the slave had neither part nor lot in these any more than in the right of a man to the use of his own limbs. In defining, therefore, jura rerum to be the equal rights of all, we must be understood to mean, of all who have any rights. Perhaps, indeed, instead of saying that jura rerum are the rights of men regarded as equal, it would be more exact to say, that while jus personarum regards exclusively the unequal capacities, that is, the unequal rights of persons, jus rerum treats of rights irrespectively both of the equality and the inequality of the persons in whom they are vested, leaving their equal or unequal distribution to be determined by jus personarum. In order to mark the natural position of these rights in the civil code, I have avoided designating them, with Blackstone, by the name of Personal rights, a term which I am precluded from using by yet another reason. I have employed the terms Personal right and Real right to mark the antithesis of rights against a single debtor and rights against the universe. Now the rights in question are rights that imply a negative obligation incumbent on all the world, that is to say, in our sense of the words they are not Personal, but Real. As contrasted with Acquired rights (Erworbene rechte, jus quaesitum) they are called Birthrights or PRIMORDIAL rights (Urrechte), names which are open to objection, as they may seem to imply a superior dignity of these rights, or an independence, in contrast with other rights, of positive legislation, characters which |