Introduction
3. Lastly (passing over Jhering’s unquestioned prominence as an historian of the Roman law, his authority on various special questions of dogmatic law, and his strictly professorial labors), Jhering’s great claim to distinction is due, as already suggested, to his treatment of the nature of legal rights by which he established the juristic basis for a social reconstruction of legal institutions. His own interpretation of the test of legislative policy — social utility — may be rejected as amorphous, as a “mollusk of ideas,” without derogating from the value and great practical importance of his original discovery. Unless it must be said that the world moves on regardless of the thoughts of legal scientists and legal philosophers, it is inconceivable that civilized States could have broken the barriers of the eighteenth century without
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