"
In this perversion of the courts lay, as I understand it, the foulest
horror of the French Revolution. It was the effect of the rigidity of
privilege, a rigidity which found its incarnation in the judiciary. The
constitutional decisions of the parliaments under the old regime would
alone have made their continuance impossible, but the worst evil was
that, after the shell crumbled, the mind within the shell survived, and
discredited the whole regular administration of justice. When the
National Assembly came to examine grievances it found protests against
the judicial system from every corner of France, and it referred these
petitions to a committee which reported in August, 1789. Setting aside
the centralization and consolidation of the system as being, for us,
immaterial, the committee laid down four leading principles of reform.
First, purchase of place should be abolished, and judicial office should
be recognized as a public trust. Second, judges should be confined to
applying, and restrained from interpreting, the law. That is to say, the
judges should be forbidden to legislate.
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