The Struggle for Law
I distinguish in this respect three stages of development. The first is that, if I may say so, of the boundless violence of the feeling of legal right, not yet capable of self-control, of the older law; the second is that of the measured strength of the feeling of legal right in the intermediate law; the third is that of the decline of the feeling of legal right at the close of the Empire, and especially in the Justinian law.
I here sum up, in a few words, the result of the researches which I have made and published in another work, on the form under which this question appears to us in the first stage of its development. In this stage, such was the sensitiveness of the feeling of legal right that every violation of or attack on one’s personal rights was looked at from the standpoint of subjective injustice and the degree of guilt of the aggressor not taken into consideration; and hence the complainant exacted satisfaction for the injury done, both from the person who was only formally guilty and from the person who was really
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