An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law by Roscoe Pound (free novels to read .txt) 📕

In Anglo-American law today there are no less than seven agencies for individualizing the application of law. We achieve an individualization in practice: (1) through the discretion of courts in the application of equitable remedies; (2) through legal standards applied to conduct generally when injury results and also to certain relations and callings; (3) through the power of juries to render general verdicts; (4) through latitude of judicial application involved in finding the law; (5) through devices for adjusting penal treatment to the individual offender; (6) through informal methods of judicial administration in petty courts, and (7) through administrative tribunals. The second and fourth have been considered. Let us look for a moment at the others.

Discretion in the exercise of equitable remedies is an outgrowth of the purely personal intervention in extraordinary cases on grounds that appealed to the conscience of the chancellor in which equity jurisdiction has its origin. Something of the original flavor of equitable interposition remains in the doctrine of personal bar to relief, and in the ethical quality of some of the maxims which announce policies to be pursued in the exercise of the chancellor's powers. But it was possible for the nineteenth century to reconcile what remained of the chancellor's discretion with its mode of thinking. Where the plaintiff's right was legal but the legal remedy was not adequate to secure him in what the legal right entitled him to claim, equity gave a concurrent remedy supplementing the strict law. As the remedy in equity was supplementary and concurrent, in case the chancellor in his discretion kept his hands off, as he would if he felt that he could not bring about an equitable result, the law would still operate. The plaintiff's right was in no wise at the mercy of anyone's discretion. He merely lost an extraordinary and supplementary remedy and was left to the ordinary course of the law. Such was the orthodox view of the relation of law and equity. Equity did not alter a jot or tittle of the law. It was a remedial system alongside of the law, taking the law for granted and giving legal rights greater efficacy in certain situations. But take the case of a "hard bargain," where the chancellor in his discretion may deny specific performance. In England and in several states the damages at law do not include the value of the bargain where the contract is for the sale of land. Hence unless specific performance is granted, the plaintiff's legal right is defeated. It is notorious that bargains appeal differently to different chancellors in this respect. In the hands of some the doctrine as to hard bargains has a tendency to become wooden, as it were. There is a hard and fast rule that certain bargains are "hard" and that equity will not enforce them. In states where the value of the bargain may be recovered at law, it may well be sometimes that the bargain might as well be enforced in equity, if it is not to be cancelled. But the chancellor is not unlikely to wash his hands of a hard case, saying that the court of law is more callous; let that court act, although that court is the same judge with another docket before him. In other hands, the doctrine tends to become ultro-ethical and to impair the security of transactions. In other words, the margin of discretion in application of equitable remedies tends on the one hand to disappear through crystallization of the principles governing its exercise into rigid rules, or on the other hand, to become overpersonal and uncertain and capricious. Yet as one reads the reports attentively he cannot doubt that in action it is an important engine of justice; that it is a needed safety valve in the working of our legal system.

At common law the chief reliance for individualizing the application of law is the power of juries to render general verdicts, the power to find the facts in such a way as to compel a different result from that which the legal rule strictly applied would require. In appearance there has been no individualization. The judgment follows necessarily and mechanically from the facts upon the record. But the facts found were found in order to reach the result and are by no means necessarily the facts of the actual case. Probably this power alone made the common law of master and servant tolerable in the last generation. Yet exercise of this power, with respect to which, as Lord Coke expressed it, "the jurors are chancellors," has made the jury an unsatisfactory tribunal in many classes of cases. It is largely responsible for the practice of repeated new trials which makes the jury a most expensive tribunal. The crude individualization achieved by juries, influenced by emotional appeals, prejudice and the peculiar personal ideas of individual jurors, involves quite as much injustice at one extreme as mechanical application of law by judges at the other extreme. Indeed the unchecked discretion of juries, which legislation has brought about in some jurisdictions, is worse than the hobbled court and rigid mechanical application of law from which it is a reaction.

Our administration of punitive justice is full of devices for individualizing the application of criminal law. Our complicated machinery of prosecution involves a great series of mitigating agencies whereby individual offenders may be spared or dealt with leniently. Beginning at the bottom there is the discretion of the police as to who and what shall be brought to the judicial mill. Next are the wide powers of our prosecuting officers who may ignore offences or offenders, may dismiss proceedings in their earlier stages, may present them to grand juries in such a way that no indictment results, or may enter a nolle prosequi after indictment. Even if the public prosecutor desires to prosecute, the grand jury may ignore the charge. If the cause comes to trial, the petit jury may exercise a dispensing power by means of a general verdict. Next comes judicial discretion as to sentence, or in some jurisdictions, assessment of punishment by the discretion of the trial jury. Upon these are superposed administrative parole or probation and executive power to pardon. The lawyer-politician who practices in the criminal courts knows well how to work upon this complicated machinery so as to enable the professional criminal to escape as well as those or even instead of those for whom these devices were intended. They have been developed to obviate the unhappy results of a theory which would have made the punishment mechanically fit the crime instead of adjusting the penal treatment to the criminal. Here, as elsewhere, the attempt to exclude the administrative element has brought about back-handed means of individualization which go beyond the needs of the situation and defeat the purposes of the law.

Even more striking is the recrudescence of personal government, by way of reaction from an extreme of government of laws and not of men, which is involved in the setting up of administrative tribunals on every hand and for every purpose. The regulation of public utilities, apportionment of the use of the water of running streams among different appropriators, workmen's compensation, the actual duration and nature of punishment for crime, admission to and practice of professions and even of trades, the power to enter or to remain in the country, banking, insurance, unfair competition and restraint of trade, the enforcement of factory laws, of pure food laws, of housing laws and of laws as to protection from fire and the relation of principal and agent, as between farmers and commission merchants, are but some of the subjects which the living law, the law in action, is leaving to executive justice in administrative tribunals. To some extent this is required by the increasing complexity of the social order and the minute division of labor which it involves. Yet this complexity and this division of labor developed for generations in which the common-law jealousy of administration was dominant. Chiefly our revival of executive justice in the present century is one of those reversions to justice without law which are perennial in legal history. As in the case of like reversions in the past it is the forerunner of growth. It is the first form of reaction from the overrigid application of law in a period of stability. A bad adjustment between law and administration and cumbrous, ineffective and unbusinesslike legal procedure, involving waste of time and money in the mere etiquette of justice, are doing in our time what like conditions did in English law in the middle of the sixteenth century.

If we look back at the means of individualizing the application of law which have developed in our legal system, it will be seen that almost without exception they have to do with cases involving the moral quality of individual conduct or of the conduct of enterprises, as distinguished from matters of property and of commercial law. Equity uses its powers of individualizing to the best advantage in connection with the conduct of those in whom trust and confidence have been reposed. Legal standards are used chiefly in the law of torts, in the law of public utilities and in the law as to fiduciary relations. Jury lawlessness is an agency of justice chiefly in connection with the moral quality of conduct where the special circumstances exclude that "intelligence without passion" which, according to Aristotle, characterizes the law. It is significant that in England today the civil jury is substantially confined to cases of defamation, malicious prosecution, assault and battery and breach of promise of marriage. Judicial individualization through choice of a rule is most noticeable in the law of torts, in the law of domestic relations and in passing upon the conduct of enterprises. The elaborate system of individualization in criminal procedure has to do wholly with individual human conduct. The informal methods of petty courts are meant for tribunals which pass upon conduct in the crowd and hurry of our large cities. The administrative tribunals, which are setting up on every hand, are most called for and prove most effective as means of regulating the conduct of enterprises.

A like conclusion is suggested when we look into the related controversy as to the respective provinces of common law and of legislation. Inheritance and succession, definition of interests in property and the conveyance thereof, matters of commercial law and the creation, incidents and transfer of obligations have proved a fruitful field for legislation. In these cases the social interest in the general security is the controlling element. But where the questions are not of interests of substance but of the weighing of human conduct and passing upon its moral aspects, legislation has accomplished little. No codification of the law of torts has done more than provide a few significantly broad generalizations. On the other hand, succession to property is everywhere a matter of statute law and commercial law is codified or codifying throughout the world. Moreover the common law insists upon its doctrine of stare decisis chiefly in the two cases of property and commercial law. Where legislation is effective, there also mechanical application is effective and desirable. Where legislation is ineffective, the same difficulties that prevent