^70:11.6 Law is a codified record of long human experience, public opinion crystallized and legalized. The mores were the raw material of accumulated experience out of which later ruling minds formulated the written laws. The ancient judge had no laws. When he handed down a decision, he simply said, “It is the custom.”

^70:11.7 Reference to precedent in court decisions represents the effort of judges to adapt written laws to the changing conditions of society. This provides for progressive adaptation to altering social conditions combined with the impressiveness of traditional continuity.

^70:11.8 ¶ Property disputes were handled in many ways, such as:

^70:11.9 1. By destroying the disputed property.

^70:11.10 2. By force — the contestants fought it out.

^70:11.11 3. By arbitration — a third party decided.

^70:11.12 4. By appeal to the elders — later to the courts.

^70:11.13 ¶ The first courts were regulated fistic encounters; the judges were merely umpires or referees. They saw to it that the fight was carried on according to approved rules. On entering a court combat, each party made a deposit with the judge to pay the costs and fine after one had been defeated by the other. “Might was still right.” Later on, verbal arguments were substituted for physical blows.

^70:11.14 The whole idea of primitive justice was not so much to be fair as to dispose of the contest and thus prevent public disorder and private violence. But primitive man did not so much resent what would now be regarded as an injustice; it was taken for granted that those who had power would use it selfishly. Nevertheless, the status of any civilization may be very accurately determined by the thoroughness and equity of its courts and by the integrity of its judges.

^70:12.1 The great struggle in the evolution of government has concerned the concentration of power. The universe administrators have learned from experience that the evolutionary peoples on the inhabited worlds are best regulated by the representative type of civil government when there is maintained proper balance of power between the well-co-ordinated executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

^70:12.2 ¶ While primitive authority was based on strength, physical power, the ideal government is the representative system wherein leadership is based on ability, but in the days of barbarism there was entirely too much war to permit representative government to function effectively. In the long struggle between division of authority and unity of command, the dictator won. The early and diffuse powers of the primitive council of elders were gradually concentrated in the person of the absolute monarch. After the arrival of real kings the groups of elders persisted as quasi-legislative-judicial advisory bodies; later on, legislatures of co-ordinate status made their appearance, and eventually supreme courts of adjudication were established separate from the legislatures.

^70:12.3 The king was the executor of the mores, the original or unwritten law. Later he enforced the legislative enactments, the crystallization of public opinion. A popular assembly as an expression of public opinion, though slow in appearing, marked a great social advance.

^70:12.4 The early kings were greatly restricted by the mores — by tradition or public opinion. In recent times some Urantia nations have codified these mores into documentary bases for government.

^70:12.5 ¶ Urantia mortals are entitled to liberty; they should create their systems of government; they should adopt their constitutions or other charters of civil authority and administrative procedure. And having done this, they should select their most competent and worthy fellows as chief executives. For representatives in the legislative branch they should elect only those who are qualified intellectually and morally to fulfil such sacred responsibilities. As judges of their high and supreme tribunals only those who are endowed with natural ability and who have been made wise by replete experience should be chosen.

^70:12.6 If men would maintain their freedom, they must, after having chosen their charter of liberty, provide for its wise, intelligent, and fearless interpretation to the end that there may be prevented:

^70:12.7 1. Usurpation of unwarranted power by either the executive or legislative branches.

^70:12.8 2. Machinations of ignorant and superstitious agitators.

^70:12.9 3. Retardation of scientific progress.

^70:12.10 4. Stalemate of the dominance of mediocrity.

^70:12.11 5. Domination by vicious minorities.

^70:12.12 6. Control by ambitious and clever would-be dictators.

^70:12.13 7. Disastrous disruption of panics.

^70:12.14 8. Exploitation by the unscrupulous.

^70:12.15 9. Taxation enslavement of the citizenry by the state.

^70:12.16 10. Failure of social and economic fairness.

^70:12.17 11. Union of church and state.

^70:12.18 12. Loss of personal liberty.

^70:12.19 ¶ These are the purposes and aims of constitutional tribunals acting as governors upon the engines of representative government on an evolutionary world.

^70:12.20 Mankind’s struggle to perfect government on Urantia has to do with perfecting channels of administration, with adapting them to ever-changing current needs, with improving power distribution within government, and then with selecting such administrative leaders as are truly wise. While there is a divine and ideal form of government, such cannot be revealed but must be slowly and laboriously discovered by the men and women of each planet throughout the universes of time and space.

^70:12.21 [Presented by a Melchizedek of Nebadon.]

^71:0.1 The state is a useful evolution of civilization; it represents society’s net gain from the ravages and sufferings of war. Even statecraft is merely the accumulated technique for adjusting the competitive contest of force between the struggling tribes and nations.

^71:0.2 The modern state is the institution which survived in the long struggle for group power. Superior power eventually prevailed, and it produced a creature of fact — the state — together with the moral myth of the absolute obligation of the citizen to live and die for the state. But the state is not of divine genesis; it was not even produced by volitionally intelligent human action; it is purely an evolutionary institution and was wholly automatic in origin.

^71:1.1 The state is a territorial social regulative organization, and the strongest, most efficient, and enduring state is composed of a single nation whose people have a common language, mores, and institutions.

^71:1.2 The early states were small and were all the result of conquest. They did not originate in voluntary associations. Many were founded by conquering nomads, who would swoop down on peaceful herders or settled agriculturists to overpower and enslave them. Such states, resulting from conquest, were, perforce, stratified; classes were inevitable, and class struggles have ever been selective.

^71:1.3 ¶ The northern tribes of the American red men never attained real statehood. They never progressed beyond a loose confederation of tribes, a very primitive form of state. Their nearest approach was the Iroquois federation, but this group of six nations never quite functioned as a state and failed to survive because of the absence of certain essentials to modern national life, such as: