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215

b. The Existence of Law

Being bound by the law includes within it, on the side of the right of self-consciousness (§ 132, with the Remark), the necessity that the laws be made generally known.

To hang the laws up so high, as Dionysius the Tyrant did, that no citizen could read them — or else to bury them in the extensive apparatus of learned books, collections of divergent judgments and opinions, customs, and so on, and, moreover, in a foreign language, so that knowledge of the valid law is accessible only to those who devote themselves to it in a learned way — is one and the same injustice. — Rulers who have given their peoples, even if only a shapeless collection, as Justinian did, but still more a territorial code, as an ordered and determinate code of laws, have not only become the greatest benefactors of their peoples, and have been praised by them with thanks for it, but have thereby exercised a great act of justice.

DE

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One response to “215”

  1. Eduard Gans (Additions) Avatar
    Eduard Gans (Additions)

    The class of jurists, who possess special knowledge of the laws, often regard this as their monopoly, and whoever does not belong to the profession is not to have a say. Thus the physicists took it amiss that Goethe wrote a theory of colors, because he did not belong to the trade, and was a poet to boot. But just as little as anyone needs to be a shoemaker in order to know whether his shoes fit him, just as little does he need to belong to the trade at all in order to have knowledge of matters that are of general interest. Right concerns freedom, the worthiest and most sacred thing in man, which he himself must know, insofar as it is to be binding for him.

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