ABSTRACT
We must now attempt to describe more fully the distinctive character of those rules of just conduct which emerge from the efforts of judges to decide disputes and which have long provided the model which legislators have tried to emulate. It has already been pointed out that the ideal of individual liberty seems to have flourished chiefly among people where, at least for long periods, judgemade law predominated. This we have ascribed to the circumstance that judge-made law will of necessity possess certain attributes which the decrees of the legislator need not possess and are likely to possess only if the legislator takes judge-made law for his model. In this chapter we will examine the distinct attributes of what political theorists have long regarded simply as the law, the lawyer's law, or the nomos of the ancient Greeks and the ius of the Romans1 (and what in other European languages is distinguished as droit> Recht, or diritto from the loi, Gesetz,2 or legge), and contrast with it in the next chapter those rules of organization of government with which legislatures have been chiefly concerned.
