CHAPTER II
THE LIFE OF THE LAW A STRUGGLE
NOW turn to the real subject of my essay—the struggle for concrete law. This struggle is provoked by the violation or the withholding of legal rights. Since no legal right, be it the right of an individual or of a nation, is guarded against this danger, it follows that this struggle may be repeated in every sphere of the law—in the valleys of private law, as well as on the heights of public and international law. War, sedition, revolution, so-called lynch-law, the club-law, and feudal law of the middle ages, and the last remnant of it in our own times, the duel; lastly, self-defense, and the action at law—what are they all, spite of the difference of the object striven for and of the thing which is staked, of the form and dimensions of the struggle—what but forms and
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