Modern French Legal Philosophy

“This is the seventh volume of the Modern Legal Philosophy Series and in many respects the most useful thus far published. The last part of this volume consists of a translation of Book I of Demogne’s Les Notions Fondamentales du Droit Prive. This seems to me by far the most valuable work on the philosophy of law published within the last few generations. Its value consists not only in the extraordinary wealth of ideas that fill almost every page, but even more in the wonderful way in which it steers between the Scylla of dogmatism and the Charybdis of skepticism. May this volume help to destroy that widespread but foolish notion that in legal thought this country must forever remain a British colony. Perhaps it may remind us that in the creative period of American law men like Kent and Story drew heavily on French civilians like Domat, and that those framers of our Constitution that wrote the Federalist drew their inspiration not only from Montesquieu but also (as regards their ideas on federalism) from Mably, with whom they were more familiar than with Polybius”.

Excerpts from book review written by MORRIS R. COHEN, published in The American Political Science Review, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Feb., 1917), pp. 137-139, American Political Science Association.