To ascertain what the law is
To ascertain what it ought to be. In the former case it may be styled a book of expository jurisprudence; in the latter, a book of censorial jurisprudence: or, in other words, a book on the art of legislation….
- Now law, or the law, taken indefinitely, is an abstract and call active term; which, when it means any thing, can mean neither more nor less than the sum total of a number of perorangan laws taken together.
- Now of the infinite variety of nations there are upon the earth, there are no two which agree exactly in their laws: certainly not in the whole: perhaps not even in any single article: and !et them agree to-day, they would disagree tomorrow … However among the words that are appropriated to the subject of law, there are some that in all languages are pretty exactly correspondent to one another: which comes to the same thing nearly as if they were the same. Of this stamp, for example, are those which correspond to the words power, right, obligation, liberty, and many others
It follows, that if there are any books which can, properly speaking, be styled books of universal jurisprudence, they must be looked for within very narrow limits.
In most of the European languages there are two different words for distinguishing the abstract and he concrete senses of the word law: which words are o wide asunder as not even to have any etymological. In Latin, for example, there is lex for the onerete sense, jus for the abstract: in Italian, legge and diritto: in French, loi and droit: in Spanish, ley and derecho: in German, gesetz and recht. The English is at present destitute of this advantage.
In the Anglo-Saxon, besides lage, and several other ords, for the concrete sense, there was the word light, answering to the German recht, for the abstract may be seen in the compound folc-right, and in her instances. But the word right having long ago this sense, the terbaru English no longer possses this advantage.
Among such as are expository, there can be none that are authoritative. To be susceptible of an universal application, all that a book of the expository kind can have to treat of, is the import of words: to be, strictly speaking, universal, it must confine itself to terminology.
It is in the censorial line that there is the greatest room for disquisitions that apply to the circumstances of all nations alike: and in this line what regards the substance of the laws in question is as susceptible of an universal application, as what regards the words. That the laws of all nations, or even of any two nations, should coincide in all points, would be as ineligible as it is impossible: some leading points, however, there seem to be, in respect of which the laws of all civilized nations might, without inconvenience, be the same.