When we study law we are not studying a mystery but a well-known profession.We are studying what we shall want in order to appear before judges, or to advise people in such a way as to keep them out of court.The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary, to carry out their judgments and decrees.People want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared.The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.
The means of the study are a body of reports, of treatises, and of statutes, in this country and in England, extending back for six hundred years, and now increasing annually by hundreds.In these sibylline leaves are gathered the scattered prophecies of the past upon the cases in which the axe will fall.These are what properly have been called the oracles of the law.Far the most important and pretty nearly the whole meaning of every new effort of legal thought is to make these prophecies more precise, and to generalize them into a thoroughly connected system.The process is one, from a lawyer's statement of a case, eliminating as it does all the dramatic elements with which his client's story has clothed it, and retaining only the facts of legal import, up to the final analyses and abstract universals of theoretic jurisprudence.The reason why a lawyer does not mention that his client wore a white hat when he made a contract, while Mrs.Quickly would be sure to dwell upon it along with the parcel gilt goblet and the sea-coal fire, is that he foresees that the public force will act in the same way whatever his client had upon his head.It is to make the prophecies easier to be remembered and to be understood that the teachings of the decisions of the past are put into general propositions and gathered into textbooks, or that statutes are passed in a general form.The primary rights and duties with which jurisprudence busies itself again are nothing but prophecies.One of the many evil effects of the confusion between legal and moral ideas, about which I shall have something to say in a moment, is that theory is apt to get the cart before the horse, and consider the right or the duty as something existing apart from and independent of the consequences of its breach, to which certain sanctions are added afterward.But, as I shall try to show, a legal duty so called is nothing but a prediction that if a man does or omits certain things he will be made to suffer in this or that way by judgment of the court; and so of a legal right.
The number of our predictions when generalized and reduced to a system is not unmanageably large.They present themselves as a finite body of dogma which may be mastered within a reasonable time.It is a great mistake to be frightened by the ever-increasing number of reports.The reports of a given jurisdiction in the course of a generation take up pretty much the whole body of the law, and restate it from the present point of view.We could reconstruct the corpus from them if all that went before were burned.The use of the earlier reports is mainly historical, a use about which I shall have something to say before Ihave finished.
I wish, if I can, to lay down some first principles for the study of this body of dogma or systematized prediction which we call the law, for men who want to use it as the instrument of their business to enable them to prophesy in their turn, and, as bearing upon the study, I wish to point out an ideal which as yet our law has not attained.
The first thing for a businesslike understanding of the matter is to understand its limits, and therefore I think it desirable at once to point out and dispel a confusion between morality and law, which sometimes rises to the height of conscious theory, and more often and indeed constantly is making trouble in detail without reaching the point of consciousness.You can see very plainly that a bad man has as much reason as a good one for wishing to avoid an encounter with the public force, and therefore you can see the practical importance of the distinction between morality and law.A man who cares nothing for an ethical rule which is believed and practised by his neighbors is likely nevertheless to care a good deal to avoid being made to pay money, and will want to keep out of jail if he can.
I take it for granted that no hearer of mine will misinterpret what Ihave to say as the language of cynicism.The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life.Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.The practice of it, in spite of popular jests, tends to make good citizens and good men.When I emphasize the difference between law and morals I do so with reference to a single end, that of learning and understanding the law.For that purpose you must definitely master its specific marks, and it is for that that I ask you for the moment to imagine yourselves indifferent to other and greater things.
