REVIEWS OF BOOKS.
For many years our courts have been subjected to criticism by men of progressive ideas, and all kinds of reforms have been recommended to give expression to the popular will for 'social justice.' Legislatures and executives who favored the enactment of laws aiming at the improvement of social conditions found themselves balked by the judiciary; and judges came to be regarded not as impartial dispensers of justice but as the prejudiced champions of the interests of a class to which they themselves were said to belong. As a matter of fact, the industrial development of modern life had brought with it social conditions which, seemingly, could not be satisfactorily dealt with by the old legal tradition. The popular attacks directed against the courts were generally unreasonable, and the remedies proposed to realize 'social justice' ill-advised. As Professor Pound says: "The fundamental difference between the law of the nineteenth century and the law of the period of legal development on which we have entered is not in the least due to the dominance of sinister interests over courts or lawyers or jurists. ... It is a conflict of ideas, not of men; a clash between conceptions that have come down to us and entered into the very flesh and blood of our institutions and modern juristic conceptions born of a new movement in all the social sciences. Study of fundamental problems, not reversion to justice without law through changes in the judicial establishments or referenda on judicial decisions, is the road to socialization of the law" (pp. 191 f). What was needed was an understanding of our legal system in its relation to our entire civilization, a study of its spirit and its growth, and an appreciation of its capacity for further development in the solution of the new problems presented by a new order of society. Such a task could have been undertaken only by a wise and learned jurist, by a man of wide historical knowledge and deep insight, by a scholar like Professor Pound who has given us in this interesting and instructive book an interpretation of the history of the Anglo-American law, and has shown us what factors have contributed to shape it. There was need of a man "to examine the legal tradition on which [the lawyer] relies, to ascertain the elements of which it is
