244 HISTORY OF LAW 



doer or those responsible for his conduct to the injured party or his 

 relatives for acts of personal violence. The conception of a public 

 wrong which the state for its own interest should punish was, how- 

 ever, not lacking in the earliest social organizations, and the modern 

 enlargement of this conception of the duty of the individual to the 

 public as a whole represented by the state is an illustration of the 

 ever increasing complexity of social relations. But it is evident, how- 

 ever, that until the governing power, whatever it may be, in discharg- 

 ing the duty of determining controversies between individuals, and 

 redressing injuries to the public, has come to recognize a general 

 obligation to proceed in accordance with established rules, and not 

 simply in the exercise of an indefinite power to govern, there can 

 be no science of law. 



A distinction between the power to make laws and the power 

 to modify or add to the law is also essential to a science of law. 

 Legislation The English school of analytical jurists, which is perhaps 

 and Law. the only distinctively English school of jurisprudence, 

 seems to have ignored the difference between the aggregate body of 

 the laws and the law. So long as the law is conceived of theoretically 

 as the aggregate of the commands of a sovereign power, no necessity 

 becomes apparent for the recognition of any such difference. But 

 the practical distinction between the customary law and the law 

 composed of conscious legislation has been appreciated under every 

 legal system at an early period in its development. The science of 

 law as distinct from the sciences of politics and of government can, 

 however, have no existence until the law is recognized as something 

 quite essentially different from the aggregate body of legislation. 

 The exercise of legislative power in the process of modifying and 

 adding to the law has other motives and proceeds along other lines 

 than those which are prominent and controlling in political and 

 governmental science. 



On the other hand it is clear that the mere existence of a body 

 of customary law does not connote a science of law. While the 

 Customary administration of justice remains in the hands of local 

 Law - magistrates or bodies administering the customary law 



without further supervision than that resulting from the right of 

 appeal to a central power, which interferes only to prevent injustice 

 in particular cases and without applying any system of rules and 

 principles to which the inferior and local judiciary is required to 

 conform, there is no system of law. The Anglo-Saxon period in the 

 development of the English law furnished an apt example, and it 

 was not until the king's justices exercised the customary power of 

 administering a system of law which was regarded as the king's 

 law that there came to be a scientific jurisprudence. 



Another suggestion seems pertinent here. The history of law 



