The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Ellen Frankel Paul, Laissez Faire In Nineteenth-century Britain: Fact Or Myth?
• I: Legal Philosophy
• The Minos: What Is Law?
• Obedience to Law
• Moral and Legal Justification
• Early First Amendment Theory
• The First Amendment & Freedom of Expression
• The First Amendment and Religion
• The First Amendment Vs. the Cpi
• The Economics of Strict Liability
• The Rule of Law In American Politics
• II: Political Analysis
• Society, State, and Right In Proudhon
• Human Rights and Political Change
• Carter's Human Rights Policy
• Locke's Tolerance: Prudence Or Right?
• Political Intolerance
• Hayek: Reason, Relativism, and Liberty
• Hayek On Coercion and Freedom
• “advanced Liberalism” As Managed Capitalism
• Common Good & Public Interest
• Uncrowding the “commons”
• Milgram: Obedience, Authority, & Legitimacy
• Syndicalism & “the Servile State”
• The Parisian League
• Conservatism In Spain
• Soviet Intellectual Orthodoxy
• The Clergy & the American Revolution
• Russian & American Defenses of Servitude
• Croce's Hegemony: How to Win Minds
• III: War and the State
• Just War and Rights
• Just Wars Vs. No Wars
• Walzer & Just War
• Wartime Propaganda Tactics
• Iran, Oil, and the Cold War
• The State and Oil Policy
• San Francisco & the Military Complex
• Protectionist Assaults On Developing Countries
• Government Military Behavior
• IV: Political Economy and Theory
• Three Kinds of “capitalism”
• Adam Smith: Economic Utilitarian
• Roepke: Laissez Faire and Social Order
• Government-induced Boom & Bust
• Austrian Vs. Neoclassical Methodology
• Professor Friedman's Instrumentalism
• Milton Friedman's Critics
• Entrepreneurship and Justice
• Externalities & Government Intervention

The Minos: What is Law?

Judith Best

• SUNY College at Cortland

“What is Law? The Minos Reconsidered.” Interpretation 8(May 1980):102–113.

Plato's Socratic dialogue, the Minos is wrongly neglected in jurisprudence courses despite its theme: the nature of law. Socrates seeks to isolate the one distinguishing trait of law as law. He pursues his inquiry by cross-examining the “Companion's” series of likely answers.

At first, the Companion captures law as binding opinion by defining it as “things loyally accepted.” Socrates is dissatisfied and raises questions based on an analogy. If the Companion's definition is correct, then we must identify speech with things spoken and sight with things seen—an obviously erroneous equation. The analogy highlights the relationship between process and product. Law, therefore, is the process through which things are loyally accepted (the product).

In a renewed attempt to define the process of law, the Companion assures Socrates that law is “a city's resolution,” an opinion loyally held by the polis. The Companion's answer is morally neutral and tainted with democratic prejudice. A city statute, popularly accepted, is not necessarily good. Law, on the other hand, is good opinion, true opinion. True opinion is knowledge or the discovery of reality.

But how can law embody the discovery of reality when statutes differ, often radically, from place to place? The framing of realities in civic decrees, however, is a highly practical art whose artisan is the statesman, characterized by his deep knowledge of the process of framing laws rather than by his individual products.

To the consternation of the Companion, Socrates goes on to say that the ideal statesman is the Cretan King Minos, a monarch enjoying a rather unsavory reputation among Athenians. He is a true statesman because “his laws are unshaken.” Though they originated centuries before, they are still loyally accepted in a vital, functioning state —Sparta. Is Socrates contradicting himself here? Is good law the product of true knowledge or is it merely tradition?

The laws of Minos are ancient only in point of origin. They are still in the process of use in Sparta, and the best of Spartan law originated in Crete. The ultimate test of a process is its product. Lawabidingness and the preservation of cities comprise the essential product of law, and Sparta enjoyed a reputation for the longevity of its regime and the lawabindingness of its citizens. Minos' laws thus fulfilled their function superbly.

Socrates' praise of the longevity of Sparta's laws also corroborates, but at a higher level, the Companion's first statement that law should be defined as “things loyally accepted.” The first statement rehabilitated by Socratic wisdom, expresses the coherent unity of the Minos.