lauded as the expression of eternal truth and justice. The reader may also be puzzled by the emphasis laid in the book upon "judicial experimentation," "judicial experience," and "judicial empiricism," as well as by the pragmatist leanings which the author seems to reveal in his recommendations concerning the future development of the law. But it is the language and not the thought, the labels, and not the ideas they stand for, that arouse misgivings. Professor Pound has no thought of destroying the certainty of the law. Indeed, he holds that the chief cause of the success of our common-law doctrine of precedents as a form of law is that it combines certainty and power of growth as no other doctrine has been able to do. Both the doctrine of precedents and the doctrine of supremacy of law, the two fundamental doctrines of the common law, "represent the Germanic idea of law as a quest for the justice and truth of the Creator. The common-law doctrine is one of reason applied to experience. It assumes that experience will afford the most satisfactory foundation for standards of action and principles of decision. It holds that law is not to be made arbitrarily by a fiat of the sovereign will, but is to be discovered by judicial and juristic experience of the rules and principles which in the past have accomplished or have failed to accomplish justice" (pp. 181 ff). It is true, the references to "experience" in the above quotation and elsewhere, and statements like the one on page 182 that "causes are to be judged by principles reached inductively from the judicial experience of the past," are misleading or, at least, ambiguous unless they are interpreted in the light of illustrations, given by Professor Pound, of "judicial empiricism." The meaning is that the judge applies reason, standards, principles, to experience; he tests them by their experienced results. Experience, for example, shows that the principle of individualism conceived abstractly and applied abstractly results in injustice and must be modified. The truth of a principle depends upon what it accomplishes this is what the 'sociological' jurists are fond of calling the pragmatist element in their teaching but, be it remembered, what it accomplishes in realizing justice. The 'sociological' judge approaches his task with predetermined premises, principles, standards, ideals, but he does not ride his principles to death; he uses judgment in applying them, just as common-sense morality uses judgment in applying ethical principles in daily life: it often happens that a principle applied abstractly destroys the very purpose of the principle: summum jus sumtna injuria.
