Legal Dissertation on the Abstinence of Natural Law from the Fallacious Rules of the Putative Summary Process

legislation, whether divine or human, so that we do not harm another, and from this flows the third, which is excited not immediately by the legislator himself but through the medium of the judge, given the mode of proceeding; since although no one should be harmed, nonetheless this happens more often when the law is not observed. So that in effect there are three paths that lead us: opinion or esteem, law, and process. I shall examine this last way, with its remedies and detours, and what as a rule happens to us in it, as a specimen of my studies, now that my academic labors are finished, by examining it in some way, according to the reason of the institute and the requirement of the aforementioned title, though with the weakness of my own talent and a wish for better things. May God make it successful.

It is truly to be lamented from the very beginning that one can hardly proceed in this formation of human actions without certain and prescribed rules, when nevertheless, unless the office of the judge is broader and not so tightly restricted to the rules of the mode of proceeding, it is impossible for there to be a reasonable process which does not cause by the length of time the same harm that it might have intended to provide as a benefit. Yet so great was the malice of men from the beginning in rendering to each his own, that not even Moses himself, after his people had been brought out of servitude through a benefit albeit miraculous, could have directed them to the law of a mixed society, both civil and military, by the sole direction of equity and good faith, which are laws sufficiently manifest in nature itself. Rather, after Jethro had supplied advice about providing certain prescribed laws, God himself found it necessary to assist him by giving the laws of the tablets. Once these were brought forward, the Israelite people more easily obeyed the voice and word of Moses, and every subsequent process, both in civil and criminal matters, was immediately dispatched: if the case was true, it was easily decided, and where the corpus delicti the body of the crime/physical evidence was absent, it was immediately acquitted. Thus, for example, when there were informants present that certain of the people were divining in the camps, no inquisitio judicial investigation or general or special, was instituted, witnesses were not examined, the Litiscontestatio formal contestation of a lawsuit, confrontation, and Tortura torture were not employed, but...