Law and Morals

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Today discussion of the nature of law is coming to be replaced by considerations of the end or purpose of law. Likewise the older discussions as to law and morals are coming to be merged in broader consideration of the place of law in the whole process of social control. And interpretation of legal history is ceasing to be debated on the hypothesis that there is some one simple idea upon which all the phenomena of law and of the history of law may be strung for every purpose and for all time. Yet the nineteenth-century discussions are far from having lost importance. We must work with the legal materials and with the juristic tools that are at hand, and we shall not understand those materials and their possibilities, nor shall we know the possibilities of those tools, except by critical study of the juristic thought of the immediate past. Thus a history of juristic thought in the last century must precede an effective science of law for today; and one part of that history must be an account of the juristic thought with respect to the relation of law to morals.