Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/203

HARVARD LAW REVIEW. Vol. VIII. NOVEMBER 26, 1894. No. 4. DIVISIONS OF LAW. IT is not possible to make any clear-cut division of the subject- matter of legal rules. The same facts are often the subject of two or more distinct rules, and give rise at the same time to distinct and different sets of duties and rights. The divisions of law, as a are in the habit of elliptically naming them, are in truth divisions not of facts but of rules ; or, if we like to say so, of the legal aspects of facts. Legal rules are the lawyer's measures for reducing the world of human action to manageable items, and singling out what has to be dealt with for the time being, in the same way as num- ber and numerical standards enable us to reduce the continuous and ever-changing world of matter and motion to portions which can be considered apart. Thus rules of law can no more give us a classification of human acts or affairs than the rules of arithmetic can give us a classification of numerable things. In scholastic terms, the divisions of law are not material but formal. Practising lawyers do not concern themselves much with divisions of a high order of generality. They have to think, in the first place, of speedy and convenient reference, and the working arrangements of professional literature are made accordingly. So the types in a printing-office are arranged not in order to illustrate the relations of spoken sounds or the history of the alphabet, but so that the compositor may lay his hand most readily ftn the letters which are oftenest wanted. Ambitious writers have sometimes gone to work as if it were possible to reduce the whole contents of a legal system 26