main theme of this book is the overwhelming importance of authority for legal development. This necessary search for authority often prevents the rational development of a law fit for the society in which it operates.1 Even where authority should be least necessary for law making - statute law - legislators call in aid a higher authority than the power of the state. That the law may depend solely on force is denied. The need for authority accounts in large measure for the most striking feature of legal development: legal transplants. Such is the need for authority that even inappropriate law will be borrowed from the most acceptable donor. In the process the law may be transformed, but traces of the original will inappropriately survive, even for centuries. Again, despite the attribution, the authority is not infrequently a fake. 1 For a recent theoretical discussion of authority see Ton Hud, ‘Authority, Law and the Roman Experience’, Viva Vox Iuris Romani: Essays in Honour of Johannes Emil Spruit (Amsterdam, 2002), pp. 39 ff. T
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