Interesting article on Mises Wire: “A Tale of Two Legal Systems: Common Law and Statutory Laws,” by Ugo Stornaiolo S.:
It was the best of the laws, it was the worst of the laws, it was built on freedom, it was built on power, it was the spontaneous order of organic social institutions, it was the deliberate order of ideology and coercion, it was a stream of jurisprudence guiding us to justice, it was a tangle of statutes pushing us to restriction.
In short, law, either jurisprudence or legislation, can only be understood by comparison, and adapting the introduction of A Tale of Two Cities, we see two systems, common and civil law, and gaps in freedom between them.
He quotes my article “Legislation and Law in a Free Society.” See also the longer version, “Legislation and the Discovery of Law in a Free Society,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023); and related comments from Hoppe, e.g. at n.152 of this chapter.
