Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 15.pdf/62

 French Law and the French Judicial System.

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FRENCH LAW AND THE FRENCH JUDICIAL SYSTEM. BY CHARLES FISK. BEACH, JR. THE law of modern France is the law of Sainte-Ckapellc—built with mediaeval yet imperial Rome, as developed, refined, pious care to receive and enshrine the crown and modernized by a long line of jurists of thorns—the pulses quicken anew upon the coming down from the Renaissance. It is, reflection that here, on this very spot of therefore,—and the procedure as well—es earth, courts of law of one sort or another sentially an evolution in ordinary generation have been holden in an unending series for from the law of the Twelve Tables; so that, upwards of two thousand years. No other in very truth, we see absolutely and actually identifiable seat of justice so venerably an every day at the Palais de Justice a renowned cient has come down to us from the morning body of latter-day lawyers, begowned and be- of the law. Here—we -know it—precisely furred, who, in twentieth-century fashion here, for all these ages, judgments and de and in the most consummately civilized cap crees have been rendered in a substantially ital on the earth, are administering justice continuous and uninterrupted devolution of between man and man through the machin courts and terms, fixing and adjudging the ery of a body of law that harks back to the rights in person and property of that long seventh century before our era—a law which line of suitors, of accusers and accused, as it for more than twenty-five hundred years has has from age to age passed in and filed out grown and developed and progressed pari before this ancient judgment seat. Only a passu with the slow advancement of the hu little imagination and the line of litigants man race in mind and morals and legal con passes by us in a mental review, a great mul ceptions, from the crudeness and rudeness titude that no man can number, of all nations and kindreds, and people and tongues. Here of early republican Rome, to the high civil ization and fine intellectuality of republican here we stand was first the Roman prefecFrance. It signifies much for the continuity torium, destined to be succeeded by the an of ovr thinking, and brings remote antiquity cient royal palaces, one after the other, from to our very doors in a startling fashion, and that of Childebert, son of Clovis, to that of is verily—at least for every thoughtful lawyer the pious Louis, the foundations whereof still remain. Elsewhere in ancient towns —a most stimulating and inspiriting consid courts have shifted from one quarter to an eration as well, that the shades of Numa and other, as in Rome and Marseilles and Athens, of Tribonian, of the lawyers of the republic, with the movement and growth of popula of the consulate and of the empire, of imperi ous Caesar and of imperial Napoleon, and of tion; but here the location on the narrow all the uncounted multitude of the elect jur island has secured their fixedness. Fast an chored in a corner and shut in between the ists of two millenniums, stand ghostly god fathers to the courts grouped about the Salic Roman road and the rushing waters of rfcs pas pcrdus, on the Island of the Cite, and the Seine, here the courts are today as in the thus, at least in some sentimental sort dignify days of Bethlehem and the wars in Gaul, as the judgments handed down in the ancient they were at the inrush of the northern bar palace of St. Louis. It is a little as though barians, during the Crusades and in the Revolution. .^acus and Radamanthus signed the arrets. The whole body of law in France at the Passing in mind from the law to the place. and sfnding for a moment in the shadow of present time, substantive and adjective, civil