In ‘Life of Solon‘, Plutarch mentions that under Solon, there were laws which allowed any citizen to go to court on behalf of a victim and if necessary, even to arrest the wrongdoer. This should perhaps be the earliest example of something close to the public interest litigation of today. When asked which society could be called the best ruled one, Solon is supposed to have said that it would be the one in which the unaffected man shows as much interest in punishing a wrongdoer as the victim of the crime.
Moving this same idea forward, Solon even ruled that someone who remained neutral during a revolution would lose his voting rights. The principle behind it is noteworthy – that people shouldn’t stand apart without any interest in public affairs. Plutarch says that Solon had intended that people should not have any pretense that they are not responsible for the incidents and disturbances in their lands and become selfish, interested only in their own affairs.
Even though they may not have been codified like this, similar public interests would have been there in the ancient laws of tribal groups. The ancient civilizations which existed before the arising of the feudal system were indeed the continuations of tribal systems. In fact, like the industrial era of modern times, even the pre-feudal world had its own limited ‘industrial era’. The political systems of Grecian democracy and the Magadhan power-monopolist state were contributions of that primitive industrial system.
Whether it is in tribal societies or in civilizational ones, the one thing about pre-feudal societies was the importance of public law over private law. So concepts like that of Solon. But with the coming of feudalism and later, of capitalism, private property obtained predominance in affairs of the society and private law obtained prominence over public law. A mark of this was the locus standi principle – that only someone who has the suffered injustice can approach the court.
