KEENER ON QUASI-CONTRACTS. 479 KEENER ON QUASI-CONTRACTS/ II. THE correct definition of law in its usual sense, that is, the municipal law, which is the subject matter of jurisprudence, as distinguished on the one hand from morals, from the principles of mechanical action and reaction, and from general propositions, to all of which the term has been applied, but as including on the other equity, admiralty, and ecclesiastical law, or any juridical system ad- ministered in the community, is a matter of great dispute, and per- 1 Continued from 10 Harvard Law Review, 227. A word of explanation is perhaps demanded by the form of this article, which has confronted me with a larger task than I had at first comprehended. I realized from the beginning that mere iconoclasm is hardly enough, that to build is incalculably more useful than to tear down, and that if my task were to be adequately done, it must contain, besides the criticism, a positive contribution to theory. Accordingly, I planned a brief explanation (and it might have been very brief) of a theory of restitution ; but in the actual writing it became necessary to formulate some common ground of accepted principles upon which the discussion could proceed. The learned author had advanced almost no proposition to which I could unqualifiedly agree, and I could think of none with which in fairness I could expect him to agree. The only recourse in this dilemma was to such propositions as were necessarily implied in the fact of argument about a common subject matter, and hence followed inevitably a consideration of the nature and reason of law and of the necessary postulates of jurisprudence. In order to bring the discussion within the limits of a magazine article, it has been condensed to the last degree of permissible compression. I can only hope that it is not unintelligible. It is but just to acknowledge the sources of the theory herein set forth. Even as a student at school I was conscious that the doctrine of unjust enrichment needed to be supplemented by a definition of injustice, or rather of justice, a problem which I hoped some day to solve. While I was so building castles in the air, Professor Ames in class one day intimated that there might be a principle of restitution anterior to, and perhaps the basis of, unjust enrichment, and that suggestion has not been forgot- ten. It is, in fact, the beacon that I have followed. His bread once cast upon the waters now returns to him. The conception of the organic constitution of society, and the conception that it is the basis of ethical obligation, have long been familiar to me from the teachings of my father. Dr. Francis E. Abbot. He has elaborated the former in a little volume entitled " The Way Out of Agnosticism" (Boston, Little, Brown, and Company, 1890), and the latter in an article entitled " The Advancement of Ethics," published in the "Monist" for January, 1895 (Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Company). For the remainder of the theory, including the argument for the necessity of obliga- tion as a part of the organic law in its application to persons, the classification of rights, and the discussion of special cases, I believe that I alone am responsible. Finally, it is to be added that illustrations and citations of authority have been sparingly made, not only because of limited space, but also because no proposition has been advanced as a proposition of the substantive law which seemed to require the support of authority.
