The historical and epistemological obstacles 153 ists. There is, as one writer on law and expert systems has pointed out, simply no alternative body of literature.^ Perhaps another, equally important, reason for the dominance of what might be called the rule model is to be found in the fact that both the science and the object of legal science can seemingly be reduced to propositional knowledge. Thus the symmetry of the civil codes, a symmetry inherited from Justinian’s Institutes (in turn based on Gaius’ Institutes), is capable of being expressed, if only imperfectly, through a number of propositions which in turn act as the pillars of private law. The fundamental relationship between subject {persona) and object {res), although it seems not defined by the Romans themselves, is elegantly expressed as a proposition in article 544 of the Code civil; “La propriété est le droit de jouir et disposer des choses de la maniere la plus absolue, ...”. And even the Romans attempted to reduce the other key relationship, that is the bond between two legal subjects, to a proposition; accordingly in Justinian’s Institutes an obligation is defined as “iuris vinculum, quo necessitate adstringimur alicuius solvendae rei secundum nostrae civitatis iura”y These statements can, evidently, be seen as rules. And in addition they can be seen as organising propositions since they orientate legal thinking around two fundamental and symmetrical relationships: that is to say the relationship between legal subject and legal object, relationships in rem, and the relationship between legal subject and legal subject, relationships inpersonam. Yet neither statement can in itself act as a complete form of legal knowledge since not only do these propositions depend, with respect to the information they are supposed to contain, upon each other - indeed upon other propositions within the legal systemas well - but their very brevity as symbols means that they suffer from an acute loss of information. Thus article 544 cannot function within a knowledge system that has no appreciation of the notion of “un droit” {subjectif) and the definition of an obligation is dependent upon the metaphor of a iuris vinculum. Moreover the notion of an obligation, that is to say a relationship in personam, has no meaning whatsoever outside of the system of relations which also contains relations in rem. The idea of a ius in rem or a ius inpersonamis dependent, then, not just on the symbolic represenration in terms of a linguistic proposition, but also on the notion of a system and on the idea of relationships between elements. Nowfroman historical perspective, that is to say from the perspective of the history of legal science, the rule theorist might well argue that the notions of a right and of a systemand its symmetry are contained, if not in the rule of ownership or obligation itself, in other linguistic propositions that interrelate with this rule. Legal knowledge is thus a question of knowing the propositions and of developing the skill of interpretation, that is to say of teasing out of the symR. Susskind, Expert Systems in Law(Oxford, 1987), p. 154. J.3.I3pr.
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