The Struggle for Law
cedent, a real curse; and there never was in this world a mode of administering justice with more power than this to shake a people’s confidence in the law and all belief in its existence. What can the simple and honest ordinary man think when the judge, before whom he appears with a document showing that his opponent acknowledges an indebtedness to him of a hundred dollars, holds the signer not to be bound because the document is a cautio indiscreta, or when a document which expressly mentions a loan as the basis of an indebtedness is held to have no force as evidence except after the expiration of two years?
But I do not intend to enter into details; there is no telling where this might lead me. Rather would I confine myself to pointing out two instances of aberration—I cannot call them by any other name—in our jurisprudence, which are of a fundamental nature and which contain the real germs of injustice.
The first consists in this, that our modern jurisprudence has entirely lost sight of the
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