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# Prince Andrey and Speransky on the Commission for Drafting Laws and Lawmaking Today
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/komissiia-zakonov-sushchestvuet-sto-piatdesiat-let-stoit-milliony-i-nichego-ne-sdelala/
- Published: 2022-10-27T09:46:34.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T19:03:49.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, Observations, Society, Humour

The Commission on Laws has existed for a hundred and fifty years, cost millions and accomplished nothing.

Do you remember when Prince Andrei did not wish to join the commission for the drafting of laws, pleading that it required a legal education, which he did not possess? And Speransky, who favoured the prince, replied: "But nobody has one, so what do you expect? It is a vicious circle, and one must break out of it by an effort."

A week later Prince Andrei was a member of the commission for the drafting of the military code and, what he had by no means expected, head of a section of the commission on the drafting of laws.

Another two hundred years have passed, and one has the feeling that nobody on the commission for the drafting of laws has a legal education to this day. But unlike Prince Andrei, who, working on the section on the Rights of Persons in the first part of the civil code, did at least draw on the highly progressive Code Napoléon, though also on the Code of Justinian of 529, slaveholding at heart, in our day the authorities make ever greater use of the laws of Hammurabi of 2000 BC and something like the cruellest of the Old Testament precepts.

And that is the sum of the rights of [persons](https://avatars.dzeninfra.ru/get-zen%5Fbrief/7449598/pub%5F635a53bd395e090aeb49ae39%5F635a53f8e1cf3446841009c4/scale%5F1200?ref=theparnassian.com).