ABSTRACT
While in political theory the making of law has traditionally been represented as the chief function of legislative bodies, their origin and main concern had little to do with the law in the narrow sense in which we have considered it in the last chapter. This is especially true of the Mother of Parliaments: the English legislature arose in a country where longer than elsewhere the rules of just conduct, the common law, were supposed to exist independently of political authority. As late as the seventeenth century, it could still be questioned whether parliament could make law inconsistent with the common law.1 The chief concern of what we call legislatures has always been the control and regulation of government,2 that is the direction of an organization-and of an organization only one of whose aims was to see that the rules of just conduct were obeyed.
