Justice System At The Turn Of The 18th Century

Humanity is, as a species, inherently curious. This curiosity, together with an increasingly developed brain, has allowed us to create and use tools, control fire and organise ourselves into societies. Humanity’s mastery of these techniques meant that individuals in these societies could dedicate some of their time to longer term planning, rather than being forced to spend most of it in activities directly related to their immediate survival, such as hunting. The emergence of societies was only possible due to the creation of complex mechanisms to manage them, most important of which were governments and a system of laws. There was much discussion in antiquity about how these mechanisms should operate, and while there was, for the most part, a consensus that the law should be concerned with achieving justice, there was much less agreement when it came to what the nature of justice is, a debate which would continue to this
These foundations were refined during the Age of Enlightenment, when the French Revolution, with its ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, further instituted human rights and the decentralisation of state powers as being vital to achieving justice. This was done by the reintroduction of the idea of separation of powers, first developed in ancient Greece, by Montesquieu, in his book The Spirit of the Laws, where he outlines a tripartite system of government, modelled in part on the British constitutional system, and by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, passed by the National Constituent Assembly of France in 1789, a document that was written in the spirit of secular natural