Translator's Note
little importance, was entirely true, that legislation is the normal source of law, and that the law of custom is simply a secondary and limited source of action. This opinion went too far only in the sense that it ascribed too much to the power of legislation. And, indeed, the omnipotence of the legislator was an article of the creed of the absolutism which governed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was believed that all that was needed to change the very nature of things was a decree from high places, and jurisprudence itself shared this belief in the omnipotence of legislation. In this sense, Savigny’s opposition to the admitted doctrine was most legitimate and beneficent, but this was not sufficient warrant to ignore the possibility and efficiency of a codification, and that great man in combatting an exaggerated doctrine fell into another and contrary exaggeration.
“His theory was developed and presented in detail in a work written in 1828, by Puchta, one of his most illustrious partisans.”
xl
