The story of history is repeated time and time again, as Professor E. A. Ross points out in his "Social Psychology":—
"Law stiffens with the accumulation of precedent, or the growing prestige of dead commentators,—a Gaius or an Ulpian, a Coke or a Blackstone. Says Amos: 'So soon as a system of law becomes reduced to completeness of outward form, it has a natural tendency to crystallize into a rigidity unsuited to the free applications which the actual circumstances of human life demand. The invariable reaction against this stage is manifested in a progressive extension, modification, or complete suspension of the strict legal rule into which the once merely equitable principle has been gradually contracted.' Equity itself, at first an attempt to correct the mechanical operation of law by enlarging the sphere of judicial discretion at the expense of technicality, gets bound by precedents, acquires a legal shell, and becomes merely a competing system of law destined in the end to complete absorption.
"Litigation gets so involved in elaborate procedure that no one dares trust himself to it without the guidance of an expert. A lawsuit, originally a quest for truth and justice, becomes a regulated contest between professionals, to be decided according to the rules of the sport. 'The inquiry is not, What do substantive law and justice require? Instead the inquiry is, Have the rules of the game been carried out strictly? If any material infraction is discovered, just as the football rules put back the offending team five or ten yards, as the case may be, our sporting theory of justice awards new trials, or reverses judgments, or sustains demurrers in the interest of regular play.'"
Indeed, precedent has become so sacred and so confused with the principles the fathers laid down in the
