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THE JUDGE AS A LEGISLATOR

submit," he says, "is that the Law is what the Judges declare; that statutes, precedents, the opinions of learned experts, customs and morality are the sources of the Law."[1] So, Jethro Brown in a paper on “Law and Evolution,"[2] tells us that a statute, till construed, is not real law. It is only "ostensible" law. Real law, he says, is not found anywhere except in the judgment of a court. In that view, even past decisions are not law. The courts may overrule them. For the same reason present decisions are not law, except for the parties litigant. Men go about their business from day to day, and govern their conduct by an ignis fatuus. The rules to which they yield obedience are in truth not law at all. Law never is, but is always about to be. It is realized only when embodied in a judgment, and in being realized, expires. There are no such things as rules or principles: there are only isolated dooms.

A definition of law which in effect denies the possibility of law since it denies the possibility of

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  1. Cf. Gray, supra, secs. 276, 366, 369.
  2. 29 Yale L. J. 394.