JURISPRUDENCE AND LEGISLATION 633 



rights of action should be granted both on behalf of the government 

 and on behalf of the individual. 



Under our system of constitutional limitations nearly all these 

 questions have become judicially cognizable as bearing on the 

 validity of statutes, and a considerable amount of legal literature 

 has grown up in which the principles in question are discussed. In 

 England legal treatises discuss only questions of statutory construc- 

 tion, because only these can come before the courts, and although 

 Parliament acknowledges limitations of a constitutional character, 

 these are not considered in law-books because they are not judicially 

 enforceable. This is characteristic as showing that legal literature 

 and therefore legal science, appealing as it does exclusively to the legal 

 profession, confines itself to producing material which is available 

 primarily for the administration of justice and only incidentally for 

 legislation. The instructive material which law-books contain for 

 legislative purposes is rarely formulated in such a way that the lesson 

 which it points is plainly put as a rule of statutory draftsmanship; 

 and errors are, therefore, of constant occurrence which the most 

 elementary law-book for the drafting of statutes ought to guard 

 against. 



Legal science ought, however, to do a great deal more for legis- 

 lation than present material already digested in a more convenient 

 form. 



Our legal literature is deficient in two branches of information 

 which the courts use only occasionally, but which are of infinite 

 importance to the legislator: the history of statutory legislation, 

 and the history of the operation of statutes, showing what success 

 or failure a given piece of legislation has met with in its practical 

 application. 



The history of legislation should show two things: In the first 

 place, the changes through which a statute has gone, both in its 

 original course through the legislature and in its subsequent amend- 

 ments, the statutory or common law which it superseded, and earlier 

 statutes dealing with the same problem; in the second place the 

 motives or reasons which brought about each particular provision, 

 both in the legislature and out of it. 



The formal history of statutes is matter of record, and for a few 

 branches of legislation the material has been brought together; 

 there are many other branches in which very little, if anything, has 

 been done. If we compare the degree of perfection with which 

 judicial decisions have been digested, the contrast is striking. The 

 need for a similar digesting of statutory legislation is public rather 

 than professional, and it is not to be expected that the work will be 

 systematically undertaken through the regular channels of profes- 

 sional publication. 



