ABSTRACT

The aim of the chapter is to trace the impacts of Leibniz’s reformist juridical writings on the practice and implementation of the law in subsequent centuries. In an astonishing set of groundbreaking early papers, Leibniz introduces the geometric method for the Roman law by defining jurisprudence in an a priori manner as “the science of the just and the unjust.” In a later development Leibniz grounds jurisprudence in a transcendent ideal of justice based on the definition of justice as “the charity of the wise.” His continuing efforts to reform the law would eventually culminate in his first published codification effort: the Codex Juris Gentium Diplomaticusof 1693. Broadly considered, the method of a “geometric” systematization and codification of the law would become very influential upon the development of the eighteenth-century law codes in France and Germany and is strongly reflected in the natural law of Christian Wolff and in Anglo-American jurisprudence in the nineteenth century. But it also leads to unintended consequences. I argue that Leibniz’s geometric attack on the voluntarism of the likes of Pufendorf and Barbeyrac inadvertently encourages the development of the sort of empiricalscience for the law that Leibniz had initially opposed, as well as encourages a rejection of Leibniz-Wolffian perfectionism in favor of a Kantian ethics of duty. Leibniz’s attempts to ground the law in a transcendent ideal of justice would, paradoxically, eventually result in the loss of the transcendent ground of justice that expresses itself in the increasing turn toward an empirical-utilitarian, secularized, practice of the law. I suggest that there are reasons to reconsider this loss and that the Leibnizian model still carries an important message of warning—a Monita.Left behind in the process of secularization is the conception of justice as a virtue and the disposition of acting from a consideration of the commongood and toward a common end,losses we may yet want to restore.