the body of municipal law which we seek to administer.
Citations seem to play so much larger a role now than principle. There
was a time when the thoughtful eye of the judge rested upon the changes
of social circumstances and almost palpably saw the law arise out of
human life. Have we got to a time when the only way to change law is by
statute? The changing of law by statute seems to me like mending a
garment with a patch, whereas law should grow by the life that is in it,
not by the life that is outside of it.

I once said to a lawyer with whom I was discussing some question of
precedent, and in whose presence I was venturing to doubt the rational
validity, at any rate, of the particular precedents he cited, "After
all, isn't our object justice?" And he said, "God forbid! We should be
very much confused if we made that our standard. Our standard is to find
out what the rule has been and how the rule that has been applies to the
case that is." I should hate to think that the law was based entirely
upon "has beens." I should hate to think that the law did not derive its
impulse from looking forward rather than from looking backward, or,
rather, that it did not derive its instruction from looking about and
seeing what the circumstances of man actually are and what the impulses
of justice necessarily are.

Understand me, gentlemen, I am not venturing in this presence to impeach
the law. For the present, by the force of circumstances, I am in part
the embodiment of the law, and it would be very awkward to disavow
myself. But I do wish to make this intimation, that in this time of
world change, in this time when we are going to find out just how, in
what particulars, and to what extent the real facts of human life and
the real moral judgments of mankind prevail, it is worth while looking
inside our municipal law and seeing whether the judgments of the law are
made square with the moral judgments of mankind. For I believe that we
are custodians, not of commands, but of a spirit. We are custodians of
the spirit of righteousness, of the spirit of equal-handed justice, of
the spirit of hope which believes in the perfectibility of the law with
the perfectibility of human life itself.

Public life, like private life, would be very dull and dry if it were
not for this belief in the essential beauty of the human spirit and the
belief that the human spirit could be translated into action and into
ordinance. Not entire. You cannot