Legal History Commons^™

A Comparison Of The Roles Of American And Civil Law Judges In The Development Of The Law, James C. Hair

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The traditional distinction between a judge in the Civil Law System and his counterpart in the United States is that the former only applies codified law, while the latter not only applies but also "makes" law through judicial decision. The theory underlying the Civil Law System holds that development of the law is the exclusive province of the legislature and that judges are not to engage in such activity unless the legislature permits it. In France, for example, to ensure that judges do not exceed their authority, the Civil Code prohibits a judge, under threat of criminal sanction, from basing …

Law And History, C. J. Friedrich

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law is frozen history. In an elementary sense, everything we study when we study law is the report of an event in history, and all history consists of such records or reports. It therefore cannot be my task to develop a sermon on the importance of historical records for the understanding of the law; the tie is too intimate and too obvious to need laboring." The work of Professor Maine on 'Ancient Law,'" wrote Professor T. W. Dwight in his Introduction to that book in the sixties of the last century, "is almost the only one in the English language …

Gustav Radbruch, Wolfgang Friedmann

Vanderbilt Law Review

As recently as the end of the last World War the name and work of Gustav Radbruch were virtually unknown in the Anglo-American legal world. In 1938 Roscoe Pound, in his encyclopedic survey, "Fifty Years of Jurisprudence," had given a concise account of Radbruch's legal philosophy in the context of his section on "neo-idealism." In 1944 Anton Hermann Chroust wrote a penetrating analysis of Radbruch's philosophy of law, and about the same time the first edition of the present writer's Legal Theory, published on the other side of the Atlantic, included Gustav Radbruch in the survey of major legal philosophers. …

Book Reviews, Edgar Bodenheimer, Robert S. Lancaster, Stanley D. Rose, Lloyd B. Urdahl

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Great Legal Philosophers: Selected Readings in Jurisprudence Edited by Clarence Morris. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1959. Pp. 571. $10.00.

reviewer: Edgar Bodenheimer

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Law as Large as Life: A Natural Law for Today and the Supreme Court as its Prophet By Charles P. Curtis. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1959. $3.50.

reviewer: Robert S. Lancaster

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Cases and Materials on Juriprudence By John C. H. Wu. St.Paul: West Publishing Co. 1960. Pp. xliii, 719. $12.00.

reviewer: Stanley D. Rose

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The Law and Legal Theory of the Greeks: An Introduction By J.Walter Jones. New York: Oxford University Press, …

A Note On Samuel Pufendorf, Anton-Hermann Chroust

Vanderbilt Law Review

The work of Samuel Pufendorf was certainly the outstanding influence on continental legal philosophy during the second half of the seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries. From his work comes the supposedly authoritative notion that scientific natural law and, hence, true legal philosophy as such, began with Hugo Grotius. What he actually meant to say was that Hugo Grotius had secularized the natural law, that is, he had divorced it from moral theology and put it on a non-theological--and, we may surmise--on a non-ethical basis.