well-known to the Nazi legal elite, to almost all practicing lawyers and law students, before they were given a concrete formulation by Hans Frank. Without such familiarity, acceptance of Nazi legal ideas might have met with more resistan- ce. Sadly perhaps, legal education may have a profound impact on society. The conjunction of legal borrowing and the need for authority in law results in legal tradition. The notion of a legal tradition means that, though there will be frequent anomalies, there will be an overall logical progression from point A through point B to point C. Thus, one can talk of a “Western Legal Tradition” with its divisions into civil law systems and common law systems. The startling and upsetting conclusion is that a legal system must be understood primarily in terms of its own legal history, not societal, political and economic history in general24. This brings us to chaos by which I mean in this context an absence of a necessary logical connection between legal rules, institutions and structures, and the society in which they operate. This absence of a logical connection entails that the great majority even of lawyers cannot explain the reason for the law. Why was the subordination of women’s property rights in the early nineteenth century so much greater in the eastern U.S. than in Mexico? Why is or was there a Rule against Perpetuities in England and the U.S. when there was not and is not a similar rule in Scotland or continental Europe? Why is the heading of title four, chapter of the Frenchcode civil ‘of delicts and quasi-delicts’ when the terms do not occur again, and when the distinction between them is never explained? Why in the same code are there only five articles on torts but on the relatively unimportant contract of mandat, mandate? Why is there such a vague provision in the code (article) as “The child, of whatever age, owes honor and respect to his father and mother?” Why was the abolition of a 24 See, e.g. Alan Watson, The Making of the Civil Law(Cambridge, Mass., 1981) pp. ixff.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=