Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statuteStimson, Frederic Jesup
History
Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statute
Stimson, Frederic Jesup
Legislation -- United States
knew that they knew the law, and the law was a thing that they knew as
naturally as they knew fishing and hunting. They had grown up into it.
It never occurred to them as an outside thing.
[Footnote 1: Gneist, "The English Parliament," and Skottowe, "History
of Parliament," perhaps best summarize this view.]
So it has been found that where you take children, modern children,
at least boys who are sons of educated parents, and put them in large
masses by themselves, they will, without apparently any reading,
rapidly invent a notion of law; that is, they will invent a certain
set of customs which are the same thing to them as law, and which
indeed are the same as law. They have tried in Johns Hopkins
University experiments among children, to leave them entirely alone,
without any instruction, and it is quite singular how soon customs
will grow up, and it is also quite singular and a thing that always
surprises the socialist and communist, that about the earliest concept
at which they _will_ arrive is that of private property! They will
soon get a notion that one child owns a stick, or toy, or seat,
and the others must respect that property. This I merely use as an
illustration to show how simple the notion of law was among our
ancestors in England fifteen hundred years ago, and how it had grown
up with them, of course, from many centuries, but in much the same way
that the notion of custom or law grows up among children. The English
had acquired naturally, but with the tradition of centuries, the
notion of law a _sexisting_; and that brings us to the next point.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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