358 LAW
technical rule in Shelley's case that a gift to A for life, followed by a gift to the heirs of A, is a gift to A in fee simple, is pronounced to be inconsistent with the definition. It is an idle waste of ingenuity to force any of these rules into a form in which they might be said to create rights.
This would be a perfectly correct description of any attempt to take any of these rules separately and analyse it into a complete command creating specific rights and duties. But there is no occasion for doing anything of the kind. It is not contended that every grammatically complete sentence in a text-book or a statute is per se a command creating rights and duties. A law, like any other command, must be expressed in words, and will require the use of the usual aids to expression. The gist of it may be expressed in a sentence which, standing by itself, is not intelligible; other sentences locally separate from the principal one may contain the exceptions and the modifications and the interpretations to which that is subject. In no one of these taken by itself, but in the substance of them all taken together, is the true law, in Austin's sense, to be found. Thus the rule that every will must be in writing is a mere fragment – only the limb of a law. It belongs to the rule which fixes the rights of devisees or legatees under a will. That rule in whatever form it may be expressed is, without any straining of language, a command of the legislator. That "every person named by a testator in his last will and testament shall be entitled to the property thereby given him" is surely a command creating rights and duties. After testament add "expressed in writing"; it is still a command. Add further, "provided he be not one of the witnesses to the will," and the command, with its product of rights and duties, is still there. Each of the additions limits the operation of the command stated imperatively in the first sentence. So with the rule in Shelley's case. It is resolvable into the rule that every person to whom an estate is given by a conveyance expressed in such and such a way shall take such and such rights. To take another example from recent legislation. A statute passed in 1881 enacts nothing more than this, that an Act of a previous session shall be construed as if "that" meant "this." It would be futile indeed to force this into conformity with Austin's definition by treating it as a command addressed to the judges, and as indirectly creating rights to have such a construction respected. As it happens, the section of the previous Act referred to (the Burials Act, 1880) is an undeniable command, addressed to the clergy, and imposing upon them a specific duty. The true command – the law – is to be found in the two sections taken together.
All this confusion arises from the fact that laws are not habitually expressed in imperative terms. Even in a mature system like that of England the great bulk of legal rules is hidden under forms which disguise their imperative quality. They appear as principles, maxims, propositions of fact, generalizations, points of pleading and procedure, and so forth. Even in the statutes the imperative form is not uniformly observed. It might be said that the more mature a legal system is the less do its individual rules take the form of commands. The greater portion of Roman law is expressed in terms which would not misbecome scientific or speculative treatises. The institutional works abound in propositions which have no legal significance at all, but which are not distinguished from the true law in which they are embedded by any difference in the forms of expression. Assertions about matters of history, dubious speculations in philology, and reflexions on human conduct are mixed up in the same narrative with genuine rules of law. Words of description are used, not words of command, and rules of law assimilate themselves in form to the extraneous matter with which they are mixed up.
It has been said that Austin himself admitted to some extent the force of these objections. He includes among laws which are not imperative the following: – "declaratory laws, or laws explaining the import of existing positive law, and laws abrogating or repealing existing positive law." He thus associates them with rules of positive morality and with laws which are only metaphorically so called. This collocation is unfortunate and out of keeping with Austin's method. Declaratory and repealing laws are as completely unlike positive morality and metaphorical laws as are the laws which he describes as properly so called. And if we avoid the error of treating each separate proposition enunciated by the lawgiver as a law, the cases in question need give us no trouble. Read the declaratory and the repealing statutes along with the principal laws which they affect, and the result is perfectly consistent with the proposition that all law is to be resolved into a species of command. In the one case we have in the principal taken together with the interpretative statute a law, and whether it differs or not from the law as it existed before the interpretative statute was passed makes no difference to the true character of the latter. It contributes along with the former to the expression of a command which is a true law. In the same way repealing statutes are to be taken together with the laws which they repeal – the result being that there is no law, no command, at all. It is wholly unnecessary to class them as laws which are not truly imperative, or as exceptions to the rule that laws are a species of commands. The combination of the two sentences in which the lawgiver has expressed, himself, yields the result of silence – absence of law – which is in no way incompatible with the assertion that a law, when it exists, is a kind of command. Austin's theory does not logically require us to treat every Act of Parliament as being a complete law in itself, and therefore to set aside a certain number of Acts of Parliament as being exceptions to the great generalization which is the basis of the whole system.
Rules of procedure again have been alleged to constitute another exception. They cannot, it is said, be regarded as commands involving punishment if they be disobeyed. Nor is anything gained by considering them as commands addressed to the judge and other ministers of the law. There may be no doubt in the law of procedure a great deal that is resolvable into law in this sense, but the great bulk of it is to be regarded like the rules of interpretation as entering into the substantive commands which are laws. They are descriptions of the sanction and its mode of working. The bare prohibition of murder without any penalty to enforce it would not be a law. To prohibit it under penalty of death implies a reference to the whole machinery of criminal justice by which the penalty is enforced. Taken by themselves, the rules of procedure are not, any more than canons of interpretation, complete laws in Austin's sense of the term. But they form part of the complete expression of true laws. They imply a command, and they describe the sanction and the mode in which it operates.
A more formidable criticism of Austin's position is that which attacks the definition of sovereignty. There are countries, it is said, where the sovereign authority cannot by any stretch of language be said to command the laws, and yet where law manifestly exists. The ablest and the most moderate statement of this view is given by Sir Henry Maine in Early History of Institutions, p. 380: –
"It is from no special love of modern examples that I take one from India, but because it happens to be the most modern precedent in point. My instance is the Indian province called the Punjaub, the country of the Five Rivers, in the state in. which it was for about
