The truth on this matter was set out by Adam Ferguson: ‘We are not to expect that the laws of any country are to be framed as so many lessons of morality.… Laws, whether civil or political, are expedients of policy to adjust the pretensions of parties, and to secure the peace of society. The expedient is accommodated to special circumstances… ’ (Principles of Moral and Political Science ii. 144). The nature of any society therefore is not to be deciphered from its laws alone, but from those understood as an index of its conflicts. What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict
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