e not find the proper field of each by examining
the means through which in fact we achieve an individualization which
we deny in theory, and considering the cases in which those means
operate most persistently and the actual administration of justice
most obstinately refuses to become as mechanical in practice as we
expect it to be in theory?

In Anglo-American law today there are no less than seven agencies
for individualizing the application of law. We achieve an
individualization in practice: (1) through the discretion of courts in
the application of equitable remedies; (2) through legal standards
applied to conduct generally when injury results and also to certain
relations and callings; (3) through the power of juries to render
general verdicts; (4) through latitude of judicial application
involved in finding the law; (5) through devices for adjusting penal
treatment to the individual offender; (6) through informal methods of
judicial administration in petty courts, and (7) through
administrative tribunals. The second and fourth have been considered.
Let us look for a moment at the others.

Discretion in the exercise of equitable remedies is an outgrowth of
the purely personal intervention in extraordinary cases on grounds
that appealed to the conscience of the chancellor in which equity
jurisdiction has its origin. Something of the original flavor of
equitable interposition remains in the doctrine of personal bar to
relief, and in the ethical quality of some of the maxims which
announce policies to be pursued in the exercise of the chancellor's
powers. But it was possible for the nineteenth century to reconcile
what remained of the chancellor's discretion with its mode of
thinking. Where the plaintiff's right was legal but the legal remedy
was not adequate to secure him in what the legal right entitled him to
claim, equity gave a concurrent remedy supplementing the strict law.
As the remedy in equity was supplementary and concurrent, in case the
chancellor in his discretion kept his hands off, as he would if he
felt that he could not bring about an equitable result, the law would
still operate. The plaintiff's right was in no wise at the mercy of
anyone's discretion. He merely lost an extraordinary and supplementary
remedy and was left to the ordinary course of the law. Such was the
orthodox view of the relation of law and equity. Equity did not alter
a jot or tittle of the law. It was a remedial system alongsi