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The Principles of Equity as a Source of World Law*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2016
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Pindar said that law is king. Gény called law the primordial necessity of order in social life. It is impossible to conceive of a time since men first organized in tribes when law was not a vital force in cementing society together within social groups; yet in the relations of national States with each other we continue to rely on force instead of mutual understanding to establish international order. Those who ignore history, Santayana has said, must pay the penalty of repeating it. Today we are approaching with terrifying speed the point at which the weapons we have created and upon which we rely for world peace threaten to destroy their creators. The force of destiny compels us to seek within ourselves, as did the Prophets of Israel, the source of world peace. What I wish to propose is the utilization of the fundamental principles of law which are common to most nations to establish a closer international understanding as a step toward world peace; and more specifically the employment of the principles of equity as a corpus aequitatis to constitute the basis of a world legal order.
The idea of a universal law has appeared many times in history. In the seventeenth book of the Iliad Homer speaks of law as related to a larger whole. The Greek Stoics found the basis of universality in the laws of nature as interpreted by reason, a law which Cicero was later to describe as “lex sempiterna et immutabilis.” Kant conceived of a Weltbürgerrecht, a cosmopolitan law, as an essential goal of human progress. Early in the eighteenth century Giambattista Vico, whom Croce has called the germ of the nineteenth century, proposed to unite law, politics, economics and philosophy in “una gran citta del monde”. There have been moments in history when the idea of a law which would unite nations found practical expression. The ius gentium, that part of the local law of Rome which was basically in accord with the private law of other nations, contributed, perhaps as much as the arms of Roman legions, to the Pax Romana which prevailed for centuries in much of the civilized world. The Pandectenrechtswissenschaft, the law of the Pandects modified by infusion of Germanic law, prevailed for nearly three hundred years among a group of national and semi-autonomous States stretching across central Europe. But the Pax Romana crumbled before the barbarian invasions of the third century of the Christian era, and after the end of the seventeenth century the law of the Pandects split into many separate systems. A contemporary example of law uniting nations is the experience of four Scandinavian countries, of five different ethnic stocks, joined in a unified legal system based largely on indigenous customary law.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1966
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