Legal science is one of the main components in the civil law tradition (after Roman law, canon law, commercial law, and the legacy of the revolutionary period).
Legal science is primarily the creation of German legal scholars of the middle and late nineteenth century, and it evolved naturally out of the ideas of Friedrich Carl von Savigny. Savigny argued that German codification should not follow the rationalist and secular natural law thinking that characterized the French codification but should be based on the principles of law that had historically been in force in Germany.
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or science:
“If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.”
—Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794)