nd third ideas and
on a political theory of law as the command of the Roman people, but
reconciled with them by conceiving of tradition and recorded wisdom
and command of the people as mere declarations or reflections of the
philosophically ascertained principles, to be measured and shaped and
interpreted and eked out thereby. In the hands of philosophers the
foregoing conception often takes another form so that, fifth, law is
looked upon as a body of ascertainments and declarations of an eternal
and immutable moral code.

Sixth, there is an idea of law as a body of agreements of men in
politically organized society as to their relations with each other.
This is a democratic version of the identification of law with rules
of law and hence with the enactments and decrees of the city-state
which is discussed in the Platonic Minos. Not unnaturally Demosthenes
suggests it to an Athenian jury. Very likely in such a theory a
philosophical idea would support the political idea and the inherent
moral obligation of a promise would be invoked to show why men should
keep the agreements made in their popular assemblies.

Seventh, law has been thought of as a reflection of the divine reason
governing the universe; a reflection of that part which determines the
"ought" addressed by that reason to human beings as moral entities, in
distinction from the "must" which it addresses to the rest of
creation. Such was the conception of Thomas Aquinas, which had great
currency down to the seventeenth century and has had much influence
ever since.

Eighth, law has been conceived as a body of commands of the sovereign
authority in a politically organized society as to how men should
conduct themselves therein, resting ultimately on whatever basis was
held to be behind the authority of that sovereign. So thought the
Roman jurists of the Republic and of the classical period with respect
to positive law. And as the emperor had the sovereignty of the Roman
people devolved upon him, the Institutes of Justinian could lay down
that the will of the emperor had the force of a law. Such a mode of
thought was congenial to the lawyers who were active in support of
royal authority in the centralizing French monarchy of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries and through them passed into public law. It
seemed to fit the circumstances of parliamentary supremacy in England
after 1688, and became the orthodox English juristic theory. Also it
could be made t