THE LAW: The Work of Justice

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Wherever he goes, whenever he speaks, he returns to his theme: world peace through world law.

"In ancient times," says Rhyne, "disputes between individuals were settled by brute strength in a fight. We have now largely progressed to a point where such person-v. -person disputes are settled un der the rule of law in the courts. But the rule of the jungle still largely prevails as the ultimate decider of disputes between nations. We must now progress to the point where the rule of law is applied in the courts to the disputes of nation v.

nation.

"For those who complain about the mystery of international law and lack of precedents, I suggest they reflect upon the famous jury charge of Andrew Jackson in his frontier court, and then reflect upon the growth of domestic law to meet the needs of our people. International law can do likewise." No one knows better than Lawyer Rhyne that the rule of law cannot be imposed on peoples of the world until they have learned to understand and respect it. He knows too that understanding and respect begin at home. He originated the the idea of the first Law Day as an opportunity for lawyers and laymen, too long carried headlong in the seething, exciting torrent of codes and laws, to take reflective inventory, to study and ponder the law's past and its present—from which it must derive its future.

"Sub Deo et Lege." "Let all things be done decently and in order," said St. Paul to the Corinthians, and from the beginning, man's desperate struggling for order and justice has given force to the law. It gave force to the divinely inspired canons for human conduct of Moses; it gave force to the rule of the Hindu Manu, the Babylonian Hammurabi, the Roman Numa and the Greek Lycurgus; it gave force to the law as a human science in the Digest of Rome's Emperor Justinian; it gave force to the common law of England, based on principle, shaped by experience, controlled by reason.

That force survived and beat down the political absolutism of the 17th and 18th centuries, which held that the law was no more than the will of the sovereign. Sir Edward Coke immortalized Bracton's words—"Rex non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo et lege" (The king ought not to be under man, but under God and the law)—by flinging them in the furious face of absolutist James I. Then Coke fell to his knees in terror of losing his head—yet his doctrine lives today as the wellspring of the rule of law.

If Men Were Angels. The American Revolution was a rebellion not to overturn that rule of law but to sustain it. Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, 33 were lawyers; of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, 34 were lawyers, steeped in the natural law tradition of Aristotle, Cicero and Aquinas and in the English common law, dedicated to Locke's proposition that sovereignty rests with the people, trained in the law by Coke's Second Institute.