Sound Ideas and Absurd Consequences: Reflections of a Legal Historian

摘要

During the 60 years that I have been writing - and speculating - on public law (my first book on medieval criminal law came out in 1954), I have been repeatedly struck by a particular phenomenon to which I would now like to draw attention: that sound ideas and useful innovations eventually - when relentlessly taken to their extreme consequences and pushed along the abstract lines of their inner logic - lead to absurd or even nefarious results, defeating the original intention.