In the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, Aristotle distinguished distributive justice (sharing goods according to merit) from corrective justice (restoring balance after a wrong), described equity as a correction of law where it fails through generality, and argued that "the rule of law is preferable to that of any individual".
Distributive and corrective justice.
Quick check: The distinction between distributive and corrective justice was drawn by:
Plato
Aristotle
Cicero
Aquinas
Answer: B.
106–43 BCE
Marcus Tullius Cicero
True law is right reason
The Roman orator and lawyer wrote in De Re Publica that "true law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting", one of the classic statements of natural law. He is also the source of the maxim "salus populi suprema lex esto" (the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law).
"Salus populi suprema lex esto."
1225–1274
St Thomas Aquinas
Four kinds of law
In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas classified law into eternal law (God's reason governing the universe), natural law (human participation in eternal law through reason), divine law (revealed in scripture) and human law (made by rulers). He held that an unjust human law is "not law but a perversion of law".
Eternal, natural, divine and human law.
Quick check: Who classified law into eternal, natural, divine and human law?
Grotius
Aristotle
Augustine
Thomas Aquinas
Answer: D.
1583–1645
Hugo Grotius
Father of international law
The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius wrote Mare Liberum (1609), arguing that the seas are free to all nations, and De Jure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace, 1625), which grounded the law between nations in natural law. He is often called the "father of international law".
Mare Liberum (1609).
De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625).
Quick check: Who is known as the "father of international law"?
Jeremy Bentham
Francisco de Vitoria
Emer de Vattel
Hugo Grotius
Answer: D.
1588–1679
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes described life in the state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", and argued that people surrender their rights to an absolute sovereign in exchange for security.
"Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Quick check: Which book describes life in the state of nature as "nasty, brutish, and short"?
Leviathan
The Social Contract
The Prince
Two Treatises of Government
Answer: A.
88 more entries under this heading
John Locke · Life, liberty and property
Montesquieu · The separation of powers
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · The general will
Sir William Blackstone · Commentaries on the Laws of England
Jeremy Bentham · Utility and codification
John Austin · Law as the command of the sovereign
Hans Kelsen · The Pure Theory of Law
H.L.A. Hart · The Concept of Law
Ronald Dworkin · Law as integrity
Joseph Raz · Authority and the rule of law
Friedrich Carl von Savigny · Volksgeist
Sir Henry Maine · From status to contract
Rudolf von Jhering · The struggle for law
Eugen Ehrlich · Living law
Léon Duguit · Social solidarity
Roscoe Pound · Law as social engineering
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. · The life of the law
The American Legal Realists · Llewellyn and Frank
John Rawls · A Theory of Justice
Robert Nozick · Anarchy, State, and Utopia
Lon L. Fuller · The inner morality of law
John Finnis · Natural Law and Natural Rights
Richard Posner · Law and economics
Amartya Sen · The Idea of Justice
A.V. Dicey · The rule of law
Karl Marx and the Marxist View of Law · Law as superstructure
Plato · The Republic and the Laws: justice as harmony in the soul and the city
Gaius · Wrote the Institutes, the model for later legal textbooks
Ulpian · Defined justice as "the constant and perpetual will to render to each his due"
Tribonian · Compiled the Corpus Juris Civilis for Justinian
Gratian · The father of canon law
Irnerius · Founded the Bologna school of glossators
Bartolus de Saxoferrato · The greatest of the commentators; a founder of conflict of laws
Henry de Bracton · "The king is under no man, but under God and the law"
Sir John Fortescue · Praised English law as superior to the civil law
Niccolò Machiavelli · The Prince: politics separated from morality
Jean Bodin · The first systematic theory of sovereignty
Francisco de Vitoria · A founder of international law who questioned Spanish conquest
Alberico Gentili · Wrote On the Law of War (1598)
Francisco Suárez · Distinguished natural law from the law of nations
Samuel von Pufendorf · Held the first chair of natural and international law
Emer de Vattel · The Law of Nations (1758)
Cesare Beccaria · On Crimes and Punishments (1764) attacked torture and the death penalty
Immanuel Kant · Treat persons always as ends, never merely as means
Edmund Burke · Society is a partnership between the living, the dead and the unborn
Thomas Paine · Rights of Man (1791)
James Madison · The "Father of the US Constitution" and the Bill of Rights
Alexander Hamilton · Called the judiciary "the least dangerous branch" in Federalist No. 78
G.W.F. Hegel · Philosophy of Right (1820)
Alexis de Tocqueville · Democracy in America; warned of the "tyranny of the majority"
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty (1859) and the harm principle
Pollock and Maitland · The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I
Lassa Oppenheim · Wrote the leading treatise on international law
Max Weber · Distinguished traditional, charismatic and legal-rational authority
Émile Durkheim · Repressive law and restitutive law
Leon Petrazycki · The psychological theory of law
Gustav Radbruch · The Radbruch formula: extremely unjust law is not law
Carl Schmitt · "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception"
Jerome Frank · Law and the Modern Mind (1930)
Karl Llewellyn · The Bramble Bush and the Uniform Commercial Code
Alf Ross · Scandinavian legal realism
Julius Stone · The Province and Function of Law
Isaiah Berlin · Two Concepts of Liberty (1958): negative and positive liberty
Lord Devlin · The Hart–Devlin debate on enforcing morality
Ronald Coase · The Coase theorem
Guido Calabresi · The Costs of Accidents (1970)
Michel Foucault · Discipline and Punish (1975)
Jürgen Habermas · Between Facts and Norms
Duncan Kennedy · A founder of Critical Legal Studies
Roberto Mangabeira Unger · The Critical Legal Studies Movement (1983)
Catharine MacKinnon · Pioneered the legal concept of sexual harassment
Martha Nussbaum · The capabilities approach
Robert Alexy · Rights as optimisation requirements; the theory of balancing
Jeremy Waldron · A leading critic of strong judicial review
Sir John Salmond · Jurisprudence: law as the rules recognised and applied by courts
Sir Thomas Erskine Holland · Elements of Jurisprudence
George Whitecross Paton · A Textbook of Jurisprudence
