The gift of science: Leibniz's legal code and the advent of positive law (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Germany)

This study tells the story of legal codification as it emerged in the jurisprudence of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz through to its culmination in the first modern code, the Prussian Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794. Codification, or the laying down of the entirety of law in a scientific and systematic code of laws, conforms to the demand of natural science that everything that exists have a reason why it is rather than that it is not. Since law too, as an object of science, must have reasons and grounds for its existence, scientific legal codes allow for the derivation of a systematic body of laws from out of simple principles of justice. The scientific approach to law offers a potential gift: a complete and certain code of law.; The gift of science, however, had an unexpected consequence. In making law subject to its grounds and reasons, the scientific approach reflects and furthers a transformation of law itself from something natural and reasonable into something that is willful and posited, from an authoritative saying into a command in need of scientific justification. In telling the story of the European debates over legal codification, this study reveals how law, as right (Recht), gives way to law as positive law (Gesetz ); as positive law is always in need of scientific justification by human reason, law becomes a means to certain and human ends. In asking after the essence of legal codifications and the birth of positive law, the dissertation raises the question not only of the being of law in modern times, but of the being of man as well.