uture causes which they do not express. They may define
conceptions or they may declare principles. The logically
predetermined decision is contained in the conception to which the
facts are referred or involved in the principle within whose scope the
facts fall. A purely logical process, exactly analogous to genuine
interpretation of a legislative rule, will yield the appropriate
conception from given premises or discover the appropriate principle
from among those which superficially appear to apply. Application is
merely formulation in a judgment of the result obtained by analysis of
the case and logical development of the premises contained in the
reported decisions.

Among teachers a historical theory has the larger following. If the
law is in the form of a code, the code provisions are assumed to be in
the main declaratory of the law as it previously existed; the code is
regarded as a continuation and development of pre-existing law. All
exposition of the code and of any provision thereof must begin by an
elaborate inquiry into the pre-existing law and the history and
development of the competing juristic theories among which the framers
of the code had to choose. If the law is in the form of a body of
reported decisions, the later decisions are regarded as but declaring
and illustrating the principles to be found by historical study of the
older ones; as developing legal conceptions and principles to be found
by historical study of the older law. Hence all exposition must begin
with an elaborate historical inquiry in which the idea that has been
unfolding in the course of judicial decision is revealed and the lines
are disclosed along which legal development must move. But when the
content of the applicable legal precept is discovered in these ways,
the method of applying it in no way differs from that which obtains
under the analytical theory. The process of application is assumed to
be a purely logical one. Do the facts come within or fail to come
within the legal precept? This is the sole question for the judge.
When by historical investigation he has found out what the rule is, he
has only to fit it to just and unjust alike.

Analytical and historical theories of application of law thus seek to
exclude the administrative element wholly and their adherents resort
to fictions to cover up the judicial individualization which none the
less obtains in practice or else ignore it, saying that it is but a
result of