Legal Education. by the rules found in decided cases that this work is mainly to be done. These differ as widely from the principles which govern the normal rela tions of one individual to anotUbr or to the State, as the physician's nostrums and prescriptions differ from the laws of health. The student must learn the normal law by which all business may be safely conducted, or he cannot safely advise his clients, or even determine, in cases of necessary litigation, what remedies it is best to invoke, or what rules of law will be involved in the final outcome of the case. .'It will be said that unless the schools use the ordinary text-books prepared for practitioners, there will be required either an entire new litera ture of the law, adapted to the use of beginners, or else an amount of labor and thought on the part of teachers that very few busy men will be willing to give. The objection, if it is one, is well taken. One or the other or both of these things we believe to be indispensable prerequisites of such legal education as we ought to have. This has been shown by the experience of all other civilized nations. School-teaching implies a sci entific presentation of the object taught, and this must be given either in the form of books or in the daily work of the teacher himself. The making of such books may not be so profitable to either writer or publisher as that of those which the practitioner uses as the tools of his trade. But it would be a disgrace to the profession to suppose that they will not be forthcoming if the need of them is once fully appreciated. That need is by no means felt in the school alone; the lack of any systematic and logical treatment of the law is responsible for much of the confusion and discrepancy now found in the decided cases, and for the past accumulation of reports which contain them. "This will always be the result if we are to go on dividing and distinguishing without any thought of consistency between the different decisions, or any effort to present the principles by which such consistency is to be maintained. "The student finds all practical law, and all the cases which constitute the ultimate authority for the existence of that law, expressed in the form of rights and duties (or wrongs, which are the mere reverse side of rights and duties alike). He should be able, if this theory is true, to reduce these to the laws, the injunctions, and prohibitions in which
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they originate. His books or his instructor ought to be able to point out to him first what is the set tled law upon every subject he studies, and then, how this law is to be interpreted to meet all pos sible states of fact. But they do nothing of the kind; or, if they attempt it, they land him in hopeless confusion, with his memory full of rules that must be modified for every new case to which they are applicable. Eventually he learns by ex perience that it is very seldom he can begin with a settled rule of law, and reason from that to the facts of his case, or even determine in advance what rule will decide it. In the great majority of cases he must begin by reducing the facts of the case to ultimate facts, or such as constitute rights, duties, wrongs, etc., and then infer from these facts the existence or non-existence of a remedy. When his facts come clearly within the definition of a right, etc., he will have no difficulty in stating the law. The doubtful points will be those in which he is uncertain whether they come within one right or another, — whether they constitute one wrong or a different one. — and the answer to these may depend on the definition of a right or wrong, or it may be a question of fact for the jury. But the rules of law proper, which define the rela tion between one ultimate fact and another, will rarely figure in the process at all, except as they will be implied in the definition of the ultimate facts themselves. And the rule of law which gov erns the case, the " injunction or prohibition" from which, according to Austin, all these rights and duties depend, instead of being the startingpoint from which he reasons, will hardly be visible to him until the end of the whole process. In most instances this rule of law that governs the case will be enunciated for the first time in the judgment, and will differ in some particular from any rule ever laid down before. "Nor is this only the beginners experience. The normal form in which all legal doctrine ap pears to the most learned counsel, or to the most thorough student of its development, as to him, will be that of generalizations of fact known as institutions or relations, rights, duties, wrongs, etc., the mutual connections of which are expressed by rules of law; that these rules may be harmonious and constant, the terms themselves must have a settled meaning. They have such a meaning for the most of their contents; in the majority of actual cases it is plain that the facts come under one or
