The core of law is authority. Law must be authoritative and be authoritarian. If law is not observed, at least to some degree, it is not worthy of the name of law.54 But then it has seemed rather strange to me in the past that a lesson of history is that, overall, governments are little interested in legislating much in many areas. “The lesson of history, in fact, is that over most of the field of law, and especially of private law, in most political and economic circumstances, political rulers need have no interest in determining what the rules of law are or should be (provided always, of course, that revenues roll in and that the public peace is kept). Rulers and their immediate underlings can be, and often have been and are, indifferent to the nature of the legal rules in operation.”55 Even when great legislators like Justinian, Napoleon, Atatürk appear, they often show little interest in giving their legislation a precise social, religious or economic slant.56 For instance, in fiercely Christian early Byzantium, in the body of Justinian’s elementary textbook, the Institutes, and in his huge collection of juristic rules, the Digest, Jesus is not mentioned, nor are apostles, nor even the opinions of the Fathers of the Church. Not only that, but the Digest of scarcely contains law later than . Atatürk’s civil code for Turkey of , Türk Kanunnu Medesini, is little more than a translation of the old Swiss civil code. Moreover, great legislators, like Justinian, are at times remarkably indifferent to communicating the substance of the law. Thus, for first year law students his account of civil procedure in J. book is largely incomprehensible, and his great Corpus Iuris Civilis is overwhelmingly in Latin, a language not fully comprehensible to the majority even of his educated 54 See, e.g., Hans Kelsen, The Pure Theory of Law(Berkeley, 1967), pp. 10f.; 30ff. 55 Alan Watson, Roman Law and Comparative Law(Athens, GA., 1991), p. 97; The Evolution of Western Private Law(Baltimore, 2001), pp. 1 ff. 56 Watson, Roman Law, pp. 98 f. 57 See Alan Watson, ‘Prolegomena to Establishing Pre-Justinianic Texts,’ 62Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis (1996), pp. 113ff.; J.H.A. Lokin, ‘The End of an Epoch: Epilegomena to a Century of Interpolation Criticism,’ Collatio Iuris Romani 1 (Amsterdam, 1995), pp. 261 ff.
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