Professor Gareis’s Introduction to the Science of Law‘ AS A CONTRIBUTION TO GENERAL JURISPRUDENCE By ARTHUR W. SPENCER HE inconvenience of the lack of a satisfactory term to designate the study of those larger problems of the law which are concerned with its nature, origin, function, and growth, tends to
some confusion and no doubt hinders the full and symmetrical development of juristic science. Not wholly satisfied with the way this difficulty has been met by most writers on the theory of law, the present author has long sought in vain a descriptive term which should adequately difierentiate the subject matter of the broader science sometimes awkwardly called by the name of "theo retical jurisprudence," and that of the narrower science which has only to do
with the ascertainment and interpreta tion of existing law and its application to technical problems arising in the course of everyday professional prac tlCe.
Speaking generally, there are two pos sible ways of approach to the law, and perhaps it is not really so complicated and diflicult a matter to point out the distinction between opposite methods as might appear at first. One way of deal ing with the law, and the way most
familiar, sets apart from everything else the existing law, segregating it from other subjects and concentrating the whole attention upon that; to put it
differently, the law is studied solely from a legal standpoint. The technical sphere of the professional lawyer does not embrace subjects with which the law is closely related; it does not include the study of other social institutions, and of the relation of the law to the forces at work in society.
The technical or
specialized science of law does not re quire a knowledge of political science, or of economics, or of any other science.
Such knowledge will of course be useful, and consult I am doesnot not saying utilize its that assistance the juris~ in
solving the problems of the law; my contention is that when he has recourse to any systematic knowledge outside the legal sphere he has abandoned the methods of legal science in the narrower sense adopted by the legal profession. Moreover, the books of the law, par
ticularly the reports of decided cases, are full of unsystematic knowledge of matters not embraced in the law as it
actually exists — they are full of deduc tions from rules of morality, and of
observations which derive their sole sanction from an appeal to common
sense—I prefer to think that such a method is properly to be described as extrajudicial when employed by a judge.
It is surely extrajudicial, if the profes sional duty of a judge is limited to the task of discovering and applying exist ing law, and of molding the develop
‘Introduction to the Science of Law. Systematic Survey of the Law and Principles of Legal Study. By Karl Garels, Professor of Law at Munich. Translated from the third revised edition of the German by Albert Kocourek, Lecturer on Juris rudence in Northwestern University. With an ntroductlon by Roscoe Pound, Story Professor of Law in Harvard University. Boston Book Co., Boston. Pp. xxix, 329 + 45 (appendix and index).
with a legal cepted process principles. of induction from ac—
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law is by treating it not as a segregated
ment of new law solely in accordance
The other method of studying the
