THE GREEN BAG
CENTRALIZATION AND THE LAW1 BY HARVEY N. SHEPARD THESE lectures are an admirable exhibit of the spirit of the new education, which now obtains in the School of Law of Boston University. They show the law to be no.t a loose aggregation of detached parts, but a consistent whole, having dis tinct members, and with each member so connected with all the remainder that together they make one body. They also show the law to be neither the commands of an outside sovereign, nor a collection of abstract principles in force by the nature of things for all ages, but the expression for the time being of the dominant force of the community. The law then, is to be learned not by the mere memorizing of statutes and decisions, and not altogether in the books, but by the tracing of the social and political processes at work in the community and the legal outcome of their conflicts. This is the scientific study of the law, and is the appli cation to it of the methods which obtain in the investigation of nature. The laws of nature no longer are considered to be commands, but rather the rule or expression which explains the facts. So the study of the law can make no satisfactory progress when considered merely as an aggregation of commands. The law, moreover, is not dead, but living, and must change constantly as the conditions of society change. The law, therefore, which was considered sufficient for the nineteenth century may not by any means be sufficient for the changed conditions of the twentieth century. It is our inheritance, but an inheritance for our use, not to be adhered to slavishly, but altered or put aside alto gether, when not adapted to the present order of things. The vast economic changes, through which we are passing, are making a 1 "Centralization and the Law." By Dean Melville M. Bigelow. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1906.
community altogether different from any thing in the past; and the law of the nine teenth century is no more adapted to it than would be quill-pens and stage-coaches. Many of the so-called principles which pre vailed in the past are outworn precedents now, and must be discarded. If the law is to hold its high place these principles will be modified or replaced by legislation and judicial decisions so as to be in accord with the present dominant force of the com munity, or the new conditions will rend them asunder in disorder and anarchy. The remedies sufficient in a time when freedom of contract prevailed are grossly inadequate now, when vast combinations of capital have entered into control of the field, and fix the prices of commodities and wages at will. Competition, the vaunted reliance of the old remedies, is as useless as the armor of the Middle Ages against a park of artillery; for competition inevitably leads to monopoly. Damages are an idle remedy. Combinations in restraint of trade fear not these, and neither do they fear criminal prosecution. So far as the public is concerned, relief must come from new legislation. Accord ing to the common law, a combination to restrain trade is illegal, but not criminal. Both the United States and many of the states have enacted statutes making such combinations criminal. A law school then must not neglect the great field of statute law. It will hold in the future a more important place than heretofore in its rela tion to the common law. To study the process and steps of the making of the common law is admitted to be essential. So also is it with the statute law. The attempt to force all workmen into combinations in restraint of trade is declared by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachu setts to be "against the policy of the law,
