Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles - The Ludwig von Mises ...

The Legal Nature of the Monetary Irregular-Deposit Contract 23Cicero’s rendering of Cato’s words, specifically points out thatRoman jurists knew Roman law was not the personal inventionof one man, but rather the creation of many over generationsand centuries, given thatthere never was in the world a man so clever as to foreseeeverything and that even if we could concentrate all brainsinto the head of one man, it would be impossible for him toprovide for everything at one time without having the experiencethat comes from practice through a long period of history.25In short, it was Leoni’s opinion that law emerges as theresult of a continuous trial-and-error process, in which each25 Nostra autem res publica non unius esset ingenio, sed multorum,nec una hominis vita, sed aliquod constitutum saeculiset aetatibus, nam neque ullum ingenium tantum extitissedicebat, ut, quem res nulla fugeret, quisquam aliquando fuisset,neque cuncta ingenia conlata in unum tantum posse unotempore providere, ut omnia complecterentur sine rerum usuac vetustate. (Marcus Tullius Cicero, De re publica, 2, 1–2[Cambridge, Mass.: The Loeb Classical Library, 1961], pp.111–12. See Leoni, Freedom and the Law, p. 89)Leoni’s book is by all accounts exceptional. Not only does he reveal theparallelism between the market and common law on the one hand, andsocialism and legislation on the other, but he is also the first jurist to recognizeLudwig von Mises’s argument on the impossibility of socialisteconomic calculation as an illustration ofa more general realization that no legislator would be able toestablish by himself, without some kind of continuous collaborationon the part of all the people concerned, the rules governingthe actual behavior of everybody in the endless relationshipsthat each has with everybody else. (pp. 18–19)For information on the work of Bruno Leoni, founder of the prestigiousjournal Il Politico in 1950, see Omaggio a Bruno Leoni, PasqualeScaramozzino, ed. (Milan: Ed. A. Guiffrè, 1969), and the article “BrunoLeoni in Retrospect” by Peter H. Aranson, Harvard Journal of Law andPublic Policy (Summer, 1988). Leoni was multifaceted and extremelyactive in the fields of university teaching, law, business, architecture,music, and linguistics. He was tragically murdered by one of his tenantswhile trying to collect the rent on the night of November 21, 1967. Hewas fifty-four years old.