268 SOCIAL REGULATION 



Austin's remark, however, still retains some truth. Even at the 

 present day the legislature has no effective means of anticipating by 

 statute the doctrines laid down in judicial decisions, and does not 

 always find it easy to alter them after they have been made. A 

 representative assembly that would reject by an overwhelming 

 majority a bill to enact a certain principle of law may hesitate to 

 reverse that principle when it has been sanctioned by the courts. 

 It often happens that a negative course is the most prudent and 

 politic for a representative chamber, and this gives real force to judi- 

 cial initiative. 



Nevertheless the decisions of the courts on important questions 

 of law attract so much attention to-day, and the power and flexi- 

 bility of legislatures has increased to such an extent, that the enact- 

 ment of a statute to change a principle judicially declared is less 

 difficult than it was formerly. Judge-made law has, therefore, 

 become subject to legislative revision to a greater extent than in the 

 past. In giving their decisions the courts are, and it is of most 

 fundamental importance that they should be, absolutely free from 

 political control, but the growth and stability of the law they make 

 depends ultimately on its accord with the public sense of justice. 

 Law cannot endure permanently upon any other basis. At the 

 close of the Middle Ages the customary law of most of Continental 

 Europe, having failed to develop with advancing civilization, was 

 swept away by the advent of the Roman law. Such a legal revolu- 

 tion could hardly occur again, because with the growth of legisla- 

 tive power the control over judge-made law is more rapid and more 

 constant. If the courts are too closely bound by precedents which 

 are no longer adapted to social conditions, or if their judgments do 

 not accord with the public sense of justice, their law will be changed 

 by statute. So that judge-made law, not the decisions in particular 

 cases, but the principles established by those cases, is to-day ulti- 

 mately subject to political approval. The nineteenth century has 

 certainly shown that in Anglo-Saxon countries the vitality of judge- 

 made law has in no wise diminished; but it endures upon the con- 

 dition that the principles of law so established must be in general 

 accord with the sense of justice of the community; and that where 

 this is not the case they can be and will be set aside. 



Let us now turn to the relations between social science on the one 

 hand and politics and jurisprudence on the other. 



The collections of people treated in the various sections under the 

 Department of Social Science at this Congress fall into two distinct 

 classes. They appear to be distinguished in the programme by the 

 terms community and group, and hence those expressions will be used 

 in this paper, the word " group " indicating a body of people who, as 

 the cause or result of similar conditions, display similar feelings and 



