Blackstone
- How do we understand law in a meaningful way, and what is meaningful?
- Coherent frame work for law
- Breaks law into rights(Rights over persons & property) and wrongs(Public wrongs and private wrongs)
Breaking down law
- Natural person : Born person
- Artificial person: Person created by the law by legal fiction (Facts assumed by the courts and law used to apply to legal rules).
- A legal fiction creates laws that we would ordinarily not work with
- Absolute rights: Inherent rights, born with them
- Relative rights: come with participation in society
Balancing rights and security
- Maintaining absolute rights of people through law
- Laws diminish freedom, by putting constraints on citizens to harm others
- For balance, we regulate somethings to a degree for protection
Blackstone's absolute rights
- Right of personal security: Legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of life
- Personal liberty of individuals: Power of locomotion and movement
- Property : free use and dispose of property
Property
- Necessity begat property
- No one has a personal property, it belongs to everyone (in the early days)
Waddams
- Doesn't agree with Blackstone's taxonomy model
- You start to mix up historical and non-historical compositions, creating a mix-up
- The historical component: Looking at past law and is testable by evidence
- Non-historical : ideas on how laws should work
- when it's mixed up together, you focus on the ones that work for you making it untestable and un-useful
- He says there has to be a distinction between principle and policy on public law i.e principle (rule framed by laws) and policy (rule grounded in principle)
Relationships b/w Principle and policy
1. Completely separate: Private law is to apply existing legal rules that are derived from legal sources. Not making new laws or implementing public