632 PRIVATE LAW 



and harmonizing methods of legislation will, in the near future, 

 be further extended and especially that they will receive the active 

 support of legislative bodies. 



IV 



For the purposes of the relation between jurisprudence and 

 legislation statutes may be divided into two great groups, those 

 which deal with ordinary civil relations (rights of property, trans- 

 fer, contract, debt, agency, suretyship, wills and estates of deced- 

 ents, etc.) or with questions of procedure and practice, and those 

 which fall mainly under the general heads of administration, police, 

 and revenue. 



In the framing of statutes of the first group, purely legal consid- 

 erations have generally been controlling, and, on the whole, that 

 legislation has been in substance as well as in form the work of pro- 

 fessional jurists. 



In the framing of measures of the second group, on the other 

 hand, the attention of law-makers is centered on political, social, 

 and economic interests, and desired improvements call above all for 

 a careful, intelligent, and impartial consideration of facts not pri- 

 marily legal. The wisdom and justice of this legislation is a question 

 of economics or politics, or of the technicalities of trade and industry, 

 and not of jurisprudence, and if our courts could be assured that 

 the statutes brought before them embodied the matured conclusions 

 of those departments of learning and thought, they would probably 

 be less inclined to make the economic and social justification of a 

 measure a question of constitutional law. Neither the determina- 

 tion of the sphere of economic liberty nor the propriety of classi- 

 fication for legislative purposes belongs, properly speaking, to the 

 province of jurisprudence. 



The following are, on the other hand, questions of law which enter 

 into nearly every piece of social and economic legislation: the respect 

 for vested rights; the avoidance of retroactive operation, together 

 with the legitimate and valid exceptions from this principle; the 

 extent of permissible delegation of the details of measures to ad- 

 ministrative authorities, and the power to relieve from the operation 

 of a measure in particular cases; to what extent powers of obtaining 

 information and powers of enforcement should be granted and 

 which of these powers should be withheld, with a view on the one 

 hand to securing compliance and preventing evasion, on the other 

 to avoiding injury to legitimate interests and obviating a misuse 

 of official powers; the question whether the process of enforcement 

 shall go through the courts, and whether it is safe and permissible to 

 provide for summary administrative powers; the question what civil 



