lance of the supposedly excluded administrative
element was preserved.

In the strict law individualization was to be excluded by hard and
fast mechanical procedure. In practice this procedure was corrected
and the balance between rule and discretion, between the legal and the
administrative, was restored by fictions and by an executive
dispensing power. Roman equity has its origin in the _imperium_ of the
_praetor_--his royal power to dispense with the strict law in
particular situations. Also English equity has its origin in the royal
power of discretionary application of law and dispensing with law in
particular cases, misuse of which as a political institution was one
of the causes of the downfall of the Stuarts. Thus we get a third
agency for restoring the balance in the form of systematic
interposition of praetor or chancellor on equitable grounds, leading
to a system of equity. Carried too far in the stage of equity and
natural law, overdevelopment of the administrative element brings
about a reaction and in the maturity of law individualization is
pushed to the wall once more. Yet this elimination of the
administrative takes place more in theory and in appearance than in
reality. For justice comes to be administered in large measure through
the application of legal standards which admit of a wide margin for
the facts of particular cases, and the application of these standards
is committed to laymen or to the discretion of the tribunal. Moreover
a certain judicial individualization goes on. Partly this takes the
form of a margin of discretionary application of equitable remedies,
handed down from the stage of equity and natural law. Partly it takes
the form of ascertainment of the facts with reference to the legal
result desired in view of the legal rule or of choice between
competing rules in effect covering the same ground, although nominally
for distinct situations. In other words, a more subtle fiction does
for the maturity of law what is done for the strict law by its
relatively crude procedural fictions.

Of these five agencies for preserving the administrative element in
judicial justice, in periods when legal theory excludes it, two call
for special consideration.

It is usual to describe law as an aggregate of rules. But unless the
word rule is used in so wide a sense as to be misleading, such a
definition, framed with reference to codes or by jurists whose eyes
were fixed upon the law of property, g