Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/863

827 INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNALS 827 come to an agreement, was all that was at first attempted. The whole process was founded on voluntary submission and ended in voluntary agreement; the pressure was that of public opinion.^ These experiments succeeded only imperfectly in the beginning; but they succeeded more and more; and as time went on the courts acquired greater powers. If the power to prevent resort to violence in the first place was very weak, the ability to enforce decrees was in most cases en- tirely absent. There was no sheriff, no police force. The power of the members of the community to enforce obedience stood in the background; they seldom acted. Even where there was a king, his aid in carrying out judgments was not readily obtained. Among the Franks, for instance, judgment in certain cases was never en- forced, unless the parties had agreed that it should be, or a special petition was made to the king.® The principal method by which the community acted was out- lawry. In Iceland the declaration of outlawry ran thus: "He ought to be made a guilty man, an outlaw, not to be fed, not to be forwarded, not to be helped or harboured in any need." ^ The penalties denounced against the culprit are of the sort now called "economic." So was the confiscation of goods which he also suffered. He was not directly threatened with force; though the fact that any person who slew him could not be prosecuted put him in a dangerous position. In Iceland this decree of outlawry appears to have been the only means of enforcing obedience to the court. ^ In practice it was an extremely efficient means; but it was an in- direct one.^ In much more highly organized states, after legal methods of enforcement were provided, powerful defendants ignored judg- ments with impunity. The records of the Court of the Star Cham- ber show that the repeated decrees of the courts were defied in parts of England as late as the end of the reign of Henry the Seventh.^" THE Common Law, 145. Maine, Early History of Institutions, 38-41. On the power of public opinion in an imperfectly organized community, see Jenks, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages, 297. ^ 2 Burnt Njal, 235. M Selden Society, Cases in the Star Chamber, pref., 61, 90.
 * Pollock, First Book of Jurisprubence, 3 ed., 24. Pollock, Expansion of
 * Jenks, History of English Law, 9. Maine, Institutions, 275.
 * Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 281.
 * I Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, 26.