Page:The Wisconsin idea (IA cu31924032449252).pdf/258

 be possible that there are standards of right and justice which public opinion recognizes and which violate a constitution, the very bulwarks of justice and right made especially to preserve these very things? Such a situation seems to the layman absurd and nonsensical. Yet has not this hiatus existed for many years and become ingrained into our very system? A thousand cases show that it has. Is not the necessity for devices such as the railroad and industrial commissions, evidence enough that a jurisprudence different from that which we have been teaching in our law schools must be developed? Is it not necessary to teach those who are to become our judges an economic viewpoint in addition to the stiff doctrine of precedent? What, after all, are the advantages of the rulings of commissions? Simply that those rulings are based upon economic facts and not upon precedent. By instituting commissions we have established code law as understood in the old countries and at the same time have laid the foundations for what Roscoe Pound of the Harvard law school calls "Sociological jurisprudence." Are not the rulings, based as they are upon the police power, evidence enough of the fact that the old procedure of our courts, the old doctrine of precedent, is giving way to the newer doctrine of paramount necessity?

The judges are not entirely in fault: a portion of the blame lies elsewhere. Old forms give way but slowly