Aristotle

Life and ideas

Aristotle, a student of Plato and later the tutor of Alexander the Great, studied law as part of his study of how people can live well together. In the Nicomachean Ethics he divides justice into the distribution of honours and goods according to merit and the correction of wrongs by restoring a fair balance. He also argues that written laws, being general, sometimes give the wrong result in a particular case, and that equity is the correction of the law where its generality makes it fail. In the Politics he holds that the rule of law is better than the rule of any one person, since law is reason without passion, and he compares the constitutions of many cities. He distinguishes natural justice, which has the same force everywhere, from conventional justice, which depends on what a community decides. These distinctions are still the starting point of legal philosophy.