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CICERO AS A LEGAL PHILOSOPHER D. H. Van Zyl, Cicero's Legal Philosophy. Roodepoort: Deigma Publications, 1986. Pp. x + 116. ISBN 0-86984-645-0. R24 / Justice and Equity in Cicero. Pretoria and Cape Town: Academica Press, 1991. Pp. xi + 317. ISBN 0-86874-399-2. R88 / Justice and Equity in Greek and Roman Legal Thought. Pretoria and Cape Town: Academica Press, 1991. Pp. ix + 177. ISBN 0-86874-423-9. R66.
D. H. Van Zyl is a Supreme Court justice and a prolific academic writer with interests ranging from modern South African law to Roman legal history. These works stem from his interest in legal philosophy in general and his admiration for Cicero in particular. As Van Zyl notes in his preface to Cicero's Legal Philosophy, there have been many studies devoted to 'Cicero the lawyer' and 'Cicero the philosopher', but there has also been a dearth of comprehensive studies devoted solely to Cicero's legal philosophy (i.e., studies which embrace all of Cicero's works, as opposed, e.g., to commentaries on De Legibus). Each of the works under consideration attempts to fill this void, with varying degrees of success and overlap.
Cicero's Legal Philosophy represents the author's first foray into this (perhaps surprisingly) untrodden ground. Van Zyl begins by acknowledging the two points which make up the current scholarly consensus about 'Cicero the philosopher': first, that he was eclectic and drew upon the teachings of many schools, and second, that he was not an original thinker. Van Zyl does not dispute these views but hopes to demonstrate that Cicero did make an important contribution to legal philosophy (p. 2). Unfortunately, in this work the author is not in control of his material and commits numerous 'sins' which are out of place in an academic monograph. The most glaring is Van Zyl's gushing admiration for Cicero which at times is startlingly distracting. In the second chapter, for example, practically everyone who contributed, however fleetingly, to Cicero's development...