uns into application and so the judicial function
runs into the administrative or executive. Typically judicial
treatment of a controversy is a measuring of it by a rule in order to
reach a universal solution for a class of causes of which the cause in
hand is but an example. Typically administrative treatment of a
situation is a disposition of it as a unique occurrence, an
individualization whereby effect is given to its special rather than
to its general features. But administration cannot ignore the
universal aspects of situations without endangering the general
security. Nor may judicial decision ignore their special aspects and
exclude all individualization in application without sacrificing the
social interest in the individual life through making justice too
wooden and mechanical. The idea that there is no administrative
element in the judicial decision of causes and that judicial
application of law should be a purely mechanical process goes back to
Aristotle's Politics. Writing before a strict law had developed, in
what may be called the highest point of development of primitive law,
when the personal character and feelings for the time being of kings
or magistrates or dicasts played so large a part in the actual
workings of legal justice, Aristotle sought relief through a
distinction between the administrative and the judicial. He conceived
that discretion was an administrative attribute. In administration
regard was to be had to times and men and special circumstances. The
executive was to use a wise discretion in adjusting the machinery of
government to actual situations as they arose. On the other hand, he
conceived that a court should have no discretion. To him the judicial
office was a Procrustean one of fitting each case to the legal bed, if
necessary by a surgical operation. Such a conception met the needs of
the strict law. In a stage of legal maturity it was suited to the
Byzantine theory of law as the will of the emperor and of the judge as
the emperor's delegate to apply and give effect to that will. In the
Middle Ages it had a sufficient basis in authority and in the needs of
a period of strict law. Later it fitted well into the Byzantine theory
of lawmaking which French publicists adopted and made current in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the United States it seemed
to be required by our constitutional provisions for a separation of
powers. But in practice it has broken down no less co