Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 24.pdf/385

 350

The Green Bag

this because your work is founded upon the firm rock of a particular jurisdiction, the stable foundation from which you survey the vast and almost boundless sea of Anglo-American law. Observe yourself, your friends, and enemies, and however small your circle, you are on the way to a sound knowledge of human nature. In like manner the study and the teaching of the law of the home jurisdiction does not indeed narrow, it widens the legal horizon, and it launches the student with a strong and decided initiative into the study and the practice of the law. It tends, in a pre-eminent degree, to make of him a lawyer, an advocate capable of persuading and convincing juries and courts. But the study of the law of the home jurisdiction does more: it develops the judicial mind. Are the decisions of the home jurisdiction right? Are they wrong? This question, of little concern to an outsider, is of great moment to a citizen of the jurisdiction. To decide it in a given case requires a mind trained to weigh principle against principle, to determine which principle applies, and why, and to apply it fearlessly, whether in the study, the classroom, or in public life. It is in the quiet days of reviewing that this judicial mind is developed. It is then that great principles are finally mastered, compared, and tested. It is then that in the pursuit of knowl edge, degree, diploma, and bar examina tion are wholly forgotten, and that the human mind experiences the most glori ous moments of intellectual activity and happiness. And what is more glorious indeed than a review of the principles of the law, not as mere abstract rules, but as living forces working out their appointed destiny in the decisions of the home jurisdiction, the country, and the world? What a spur to a noble am bition it is to try to approximate that

perfect judicial mind that could tell, with regard to a given point of law, how it was decided if ever it was, and how it ought to have been decided if it never was. Such a mind would require for the perfect exercise of its judicial powers an ideal jurisdiction with an ideal sys tem of laws. This beau ideal of the judicial mind, if ever it is reached by any man, will not be attained except by a great soul whose first step upward was taken by mastering the law of the home jurisdiction. Nobler, however, than either the legal or judicial mind is the civic mind. Higher than lawyer and judge, higher than the President or Chief Justice of the United States, is the citizen, in the theory of our government as well as in the sober truth of historic fact. The lawyer takes his client's case and, in the exercise of a well trained legal mind, tries to convince the court that of two conflicting principles that one should prevail that will give the client what he claims as his due. The judge, in the exercise of a sound judicial mind, decides which of these conflicting prin ciples does apply to the particular case before him, and so applies it. But the citizen, in the exercise of all his civic powers, rising above lawyer and judge, thinks neither of client nor litigants, but of all citizens without exception, perhaps of all men everywhere, and enacts, by and with the advice and con sent of his fellow-citizens, what shall constitute the sum total of principles, the Body of Liberties, known as the Law of the Land, to be administered by the courts of the home jurisdiction, by their lawyers and judges, as the servants of the people. Is it not then true that a knowledge of the laws of the jurisdiction is the first prerequisite to their improvement and enforcement? Is not then the state university law school