SECTION C -PRIVATE LAW 



/ 



(Hall 14, September 23, 3 p. m.) 



CHAIRMAN: PROFESSOR JAMES B. AMES, Dean, Harvard Law School. 

 SPEAKERS: PROFESSOR ERNST FREUND, University of Chicago. 



HONORABLE EDWARD B. WHITNEY, New York. 

 SECRETARY: DEAN WILLIAM DRAPER LEWIS, University of Pennsylvania. 



JURISPRUDENCE AND LEGISLATION 



BY ERNST FREUND 



[Ernst Freund, Professor of Law, University of Chicago, b. New York City, 

 1864; J.U.D. University of Heidelberg; Ph.D. Columbian University; Lec- 

 turer on Administrative Law and Municipal Corporations, ibid. 1892-93; 

 Instructor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Department of Political 

 Science, University of Chicago, since 1894. Author of The Legal Nature of 

 Corporations; The Police Power, etc.] 



THE arrangement of jurisprudence, in the classification adopted 

 for this Congress, under the head of Social Regulation, recognizes 

 the practical purpose by which this department of learning is dom- 

 inated. Since it is the professed object of the private law to har- 

 monize the rules of justice in individual rights and liabilities with the 

 changing needs of society, it is proper, in a paper dealing in a general 

 way with the relations of this branch of the law, to consider the 

 methods of its system mainly with reference to their adaptability 

 and success in serving that end. The private law has developed 

 partly through the administration of justice, and partly through 

 legislation, and it is, therefore, natural to distinguish between these 

 two agencies of development in tracing the relation of scientific 

 method and system to the problems of policy and justice. 



We speak of a legal system when rules are consciously founded in 

 principle and when principles acquire cohesion by impressing the 

 mind with their interrelation and common purpose. This unity 

 is strengthened by the recognition of authorities which furnish 

 standards and analogies of legal reasoning. This intellectual bond, 

 far more than distinctness of political jurisdiction, serves to differ- 

 entiate one legal system from another. The writings of the jurists 

 in Rome, and later on the corpus juris both of the civil and of the 

 canon law, the great body of English case law, the treatises of 

 Littleton and of Blackstone, of Pothier, of Savigny, and of Wind- 



