5 - A reformed state
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2009
Summary
All those which have written of laws, have written either as philosophers or as lawyers, and none as statesmen. As for the philosophers, they make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths; and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high. For the lawyers, they write according to the states where they live what is received law, and not what ought to be law: for the wisdom of a lawmaker is one, and of a lawyer is another.
Advancement of Learning (1605), Works, III, p. 475During the 1590s and throughout the remainder of his life, Bacon argued for legal reform. Just like the phrase itself, campaigns for ‘legal reform’ can mean very different things: their proponents can be hoping for changes in specific laws, or for changes in the administration of justice and governance, and even for changes in what is understood by ‘The Law’. For Bacon, legal reform meant change of all three sorts, and for a very specific end.
As to the first sort of legal reform, changes in particular laws, one could argue that Bacon was hardly unique. As they have been whenever lawyers and men of affairs have congregated, such considerations were staple fare in lawyers' conversation in Elizabethan times, and Members of Parliament were routinely concerned with repealing, amending or drafting legislation.
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- Information
- Francis Bacon, the State and the Reform of Natural Philosophy , pp. 105 - 140Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991