Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/329

JUSTICE ACCORDING TO LAW. 30 1 Further, as the requirement of generality leads to that of equality, so does the requirement of equality lead to that of certainty, which brings in its train the whole scientific development of law. We must administer a general rule, and administer it equally. There can be no law without generality ; there can be no just operation of law without equality. But we cannot be sure of a rule being equally administered at different times and in the cases of different persons unless the rule is defined and recorded. Justice ought to be the same for all citizens, so far as the material conditions are the same. Now to carry out this idea the dispenser of justice ought to be adequately furnished with two kinds of information. He should know what is accustomed to be done in like cases, and whenever new conditions occur he should know, or have the means of forming a judgment, which of them are material with a view to legal justice and which are not. Moreover, there must be some means of securing an approximate uniformity of judgment; other- wise judges and magistrates of all degrees will make every one a law of his own for himself, and the principle of equality will not be sat- isfied. Justice dealt out according to the first impression of each particular case, the " natural justice " of an Eastern king sitting in the gate, is tolerable only when the community is small enough for this function to be in the hands of one man, or very few, and its affairs are simple enough for off-hand judgments not to produce results of manifest inequality. This is as much as to say that in a civilized commonwealth law must inevitably become a science. The demand for certainty becomes more exacting as men's affairs become more complex, and the aid of the courts is more frequently sought. Trade and traffic, in their increasing volume, speed, and variety of movement, raise new questions at every turn, and men expect not only to get their differences settled for the moment, but to have solutions which will prevent the same difficulties from giving trouble again. How far would natural justice carry us, for example, towards a settlement of the problems involved in making contracts by letter, telegraph, or telephone? Hence law becomes an artificial system, which is always gath- ering new material. The controverted points of one generation become the settled rules of the next, and fresh work is built up on them in turn. Thus the law is in a constant process of approxima- tion to an ideal certainty, which by the nature of the case can never be perfectly attained at any given moment. Every one who has studied the law knows that the approximation is apt to be a