new ideas from without. We shall be warranted in
prophesying that this working over will be effected
by means of a philosophical theory of right and jus-
tice and conscious attempt to make the law conform
to ideals. Such a period will be a period of scientific
law, made, if not by judges, then by lawyers trained
in the universities; not one of arbitrary law based on
the fiat of any sovereign, however hydra-headed.
For the notion of law as the will of the people be-
longs to the past era of a complete and stable sys-
tem in which certainty and security were the sole
ends. Throughout legal history law has been stag-
nant whenever the imperative idea has been upper-
most. Law has lived and grown through juristic
activity. It has been liberalized by ideas of natural
right or justice or reasonableness or utility, leading
to criteria by which rules and principles and stand-
ards might be tested, not by ideas of force and com-
mand and the sovereign will as the ultimate source
of authority. Attempts to reduce the judicial office
in the United States to the purely mechanical func-
tion of applying rules imposed from without and of
serving as a mouthpiece for the popular will for the
moment are not in the line of progress.

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