The Bodies of Law

• What are the two bodies of law and what are they?

  1. Public Law Rights: Serve to constrain the power of the state to interfere in harmful ways in our lives and affairs.
  2. Private Law Rights: Aim to constrain private power – individual and social, to the same effect.
• What does public and private law both concern and what does that concern mean?

  They concern the quality of relations between citizens and state and between individuals themselves.

  • Relations governed by private law exist independently from that law.
  • Relations governed by public law are made up by rules of that law.

  Protection of these natural relations is the defining characteristics of law. The bodies of private law alone are necessary to meet this characteristic and public law is secondary and elective to private law.
• What is the order of the constrain of power?

  "Private law has primacy over public law."
• What is private law excellent at?

  It is excellent at limiting the long arm of government and of dividing social power as well as securing the independence of individuals.

  
  

  Private law rights are the frame in which public laws must operate – they set limits government.