Assertion of Rights a Social Duty
the wounding of the feeling of legal right is felt more sensitively than an attack upon him personally, and who disinterestedly sacrifices himself in the interest of oppressed right as if there were question only of his own rights, is the privilege of highly gifted natures. However, even the cold feeling of legal right, destitute of all idealism, which is affected only by the wrong done to itself, fully understands the relation between concrete legal right and the law, which I have demonstrated and summed up thus: My legal right is the law; when my legal right is violated, the law is violated; when it is asserted, the law is asserted. It sounds paradoxical, and yet it is true, that precisely among jurists this view is far from being usual. According to their view, in the struggle for concrete legal rights, the law itself is in no way involved; the struggle does not turn on the abstract law, but on its incorporation in the form of this concrete legal right, a photograph, so to speak, of that law, in which it has become fixed, but in which it is not itself directly affected. I
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