Page:Philosophical Review Volume 31.djvu/621

Rh made up, to learn its spirit, and to perceive how it has come to be what it is, to the end that we may know how far we may make use of it in the stage of the legal development upon which the world has now entered" (p. 10).

Professor Pound finds that of the seven important factors which have contributed to shape our law, all but one, the feudal law, made strongly for individualism, and that it is this obstinate individualist element that has stood in the way of the socialization of the common law. Our legal tradition, he declares, is concerned not with social righteousness but with individual rights; it is so zealous to secure fair play to the individual that often it secures very little fair play to the public. The isolated individual is the center of many of its most significant doctrines. The feudal doctrine of rights and duties incident to certain relationships fell into disfavor in the nineteenth century; while Puritanism, the attitude of protecting the individual against government, the eighteenth-century doctrine of the natural rights of the abstract individual man, the insistence of the pioneer upon a minimum of interference with his freedom of action, and the nineteenth-century deduction of law from a metaphysical principle of individual liberty—all combined to make jurists and lawyers think of individuals rather than of groups or relations. In short, according to our author, an ultra-individualism is peculiar to Anglo-American thinking, an uncompromising insistence upon individual interests and individual property as the focal point of jurisprudence. Puritanism gave added emphasis to individualist ideas in the United States and kept them alive and active fifty years after English legal thought had turned over a new leaf (p. 37). The good and bad sides of all this are clearly brought out by Professor Pound (pp. 44 ff); and it is shown that "it is, after all, not fundamental principles of jurisprudence, but traditional principles of Puritanism operating out of their sphere with which American legislators are struggling" (pp. 58 f). Similar results are reached with respect to the other factors which have helped to shape our law: we learn what a profound influence conceptions, ideals, ethical and political theories have exercised upon the law.

It is perfectly plain to Professor Pound "that legal systems do and must grow, that legal principles are not absolute, but are relative to time and place, and that juridicial idealism may go no further than the ideals of an epoch." This may seem a somewhat sceptical conclusion with respect to the common law, which has so often been