It also assumes that the people
must understand the natural law, before they can understated the
written law.
It is a principle perfectly familiar to lawyers, and one that must
be perfectly obvious to every other man that will reflect a
moment, that, as a general rule, no one can know what the written
law is, until he knows what it ought to be; that men are liable to
be constantly misled by the various and conflicting senses of the
same words, unless they perceive the true legal sense in which the
words ought to be taken. And this true legal sense is the sense
that is most nearly consistent with natural law of any that the
words can be made to bear, consistently with the laws of language,
and appropriately to the subjects to which they are applied.
Though the words contain the law, the words themselves are not
the law. Were the words themselves the law, each single written
law would be liable to embrace many different laws, to wit, as
many different laws as there were different senses, and different
combinations of senses, in which each and all the words were
capable of being taken.
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