The International Unification of Law

Abstract

The international process of assimilating the diverse legal systems of various countries goes back into ancient history. Accordingly, an historical starting-point is a useful one for considering the operation of this process in our own day, for it gives us the two notable precedents of Roman law and the common law. Both were to become the legal systems of a large part of the world, either by conquest or settlement, and both contributed to the unification of law as much by coincidence as by design. The two ancestral systems were by-products or aspects of a particular kind of civilization and a particular way of life, and their application as legal systems to new countries was rather a matter of necessity, convenience or military strategy than of legal elegance. Yet of the various differences that could be drawn between Roman law and the common law, none is more striking for the present day than the traditional, if inaccurate, view of Roman law as a body of legislation, as contrasted with the traditional and true view of the common law as a body of judge-made law capable of development by judges to fit new and local conditions. From these beginnings Roman law has become the ancestor of many codified legal systems, of which the common features are not only a similarity of substantive rules, but also a belief in legislation as the normal, if not the only possible, method of law reform and unification. But if the history of modern Roman law is one of legislative unification, that of the common law is one of unification primarily by judicial action and decision. For unification is a familiar process in the history of English law. It was the problem presented to the early Norman kings, faced with widely different local customs and different methods of judicial administration in the country. Unification of law followed to a great extent the centralization of the legal system and its administration by the judges, who were sent on assize and met regularly to discuss what should be the common law of the country, that is, the rule to be made common from the variety of choices as the most appropriate for the whole community. Some local customs have survived, but we all know how few they are. Starting thus from a domestic and largely unconscious process of unification of the law of England, we find in the thirteenth century a unification of that law with the law of Wales by the imposition of English law on the Welsh by Edward I in the Statute of Wales in 1284. Unification