A Question

[/ dave /]

I should have added that the cite I forwarded was in the endnotes for an
article at:

http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/issues/v5n2/andrews521_text.html

Wormes in the entrayles: the corporate citizen in law?
Neil Andrews 
Lecturer in law, University of Canberra

...which incidentally reproduces this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:

"You can see very plainly that a bad man has as much reason as a good
one for wishing to avoid an encounter with the public force, and
therefore you can see the practical importance of the distinction
between morality and law. A man who cares nothing for an ethical rule
which is believed and practised by his neighbors is likely nevertheless
to care a good deal to avoid being made to pay money, and will want to
keep out of jail if he can. ... 
                             
If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a
bad man, who cares only for the material consequence which such
knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his
reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or out-side of it, in the
vaguer sanctions of conscience. ... 
                             
What constitutes the law? You will find some text writers telling you
that it is something different from what is decided by the courts of
Massachusetts or England, that it is a system of reason, that it is a
deduction from principles of ethics or admitted axioms or what not which
may or may not coincide with the decisions. But if we take the view of
our friend the bad man we shall find that he does not care two straws
for the axioms or deductions, but that he does want to know what the
Massachusetts or English courts are likely to do in fact. I am much of
his mind. The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing
more pretentious, are what I mean by the law."

--

/  dave  /