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THE JUDGE AS A LEGISLATOR

was that judges did not legislate at all. A preexisting rule was there, imbedded, if concealed, in the body of the customary law. All that the judges did, was to throw off the wrappings, and expose the statue to our view.[1] Since the days of Bentham and Austin, no one, it is believed, has accepted this theory without deduction or reserve, though even in modern decisions we find traces of its lingering influence. Today there is rather danger of another though an opposite error. From holding that the law is never made by judges, the votaries of the Austinian analysis have been led at times to the conclusion that it is never made by anyone else. Customs, no matter how firmly established, are not law, they say, until adopted by the courts.[2] Even statutes are not law because the courts must fix their meaning. That is the view of Gray in his "Nature and Sources of the Law."[3] "The true view, as I

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  1. Cf. Pound, 27 Harvard L. R. 731, 733.
  2. Austin, "Jurisprudence," vol. I, 37, 104; Holland, "Jurisprudence," p. 54; W. Jethro Brown, "The Austinian Theory of Law," p. 311.
  3. Sec. 602.