ABSTRACT
We are dealing with a holistic conception of location and responsibility. Although one mythic conception of the common law presents it as arising out of custom and the role of the judge as simply the finder and declarer of the rationale of local customs, common law evolved from the interaction of a small group of court related officials, the Curia Regis and the forms of argument and procedures for bringing disputes before judges who owed their position to central authority (the Crown). The primary procedure that gave power to the common law was ‘the use of documents in good and due form that ordered subjects of the crown to appear before a judge under penality for contempt of writ’.4 Kriegel finds a major factor in understanding the different constitutional history of France from England in the early and enduring role of the judge: arguing that in England centralisation was achieved through law, and thereby that developments of political society and of law were not separate processes he finds that ‘a judge was a man of the state; by the same token he is a judge’.
