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THE JUDGE AS A LEGISLATOR

set purpose to the furtherance of the common good, determined the form and tendency of a rule which at that moment took its origin in one creative act. Savigny's conception of law as something realized without struggle or aim or purpose, a process of silent growth, the fruition in life and manners of a people's history and genius, gives a picture incomplete and partial. It is true if we understand it to mean that the judge in shaping the rules of law must heed the mores of his day. It is one-sided and therefore false in so far as it implies that the mores of the day automatically shape rules which, full grown and ready made, are handed to the judge[1] Legal norms are confused with legal principles Entscheidungsnormen with Rechtssätze.[2] Law is, indeed, an historical growth, for it is an expression of customary morality which develops silently and unconsciously from one age to an-

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  1. Cf. Ehrlich, "Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts," pp. 366, 368; Pound, "Courts and Legislation," 9 Modern Legal Philosophy Series, p. 212; Gray, "Nature and Sources of Law," secs. 628, 650; Vinogradoff, "Outlines of Historical Jurisprudenice," p. 135.
  2. Ehrlich, supra.