de of the
law, taking the law for granted and giving legal rights greater
efficacy in certain situations. But take the case of a "hard bargain,"
where the chancellor in his discretion may deny specific performance.
In England and in several states the damages at law do not include the
value of the bargain where the contract is for the sale of land. Hence
unless specific performance is granted, the plaintiff's legal right is
defeated. It is notorious that bargains appeal differently to
different chancellors in this respect. In the hands of some the
doctrine as to hard bargains has a tendency to become wooden, as it
were. There is a hard and fast rule that certain bargains are "hard"
and that equity will not enforce them. In states where the value of
the bargain may be recovered at law, it may well be sometimes that the
bargain might as well be enforced in equity, if it is not to be
cancelled. But the chancellor is not unlikely to wash his hands of a
hard case, saying that the court of law is more callous; let that
court act, although that court is the same judge with another docket
before him. In other hands, the doctrine tends to become ultro-ethical
and to impair the security of transactions. In other words, the margin
of discretion in application of equitable remedies tends on the one
hand to disappear through crystallization of the principles governing
its exercise into rigid rules, or on the other hand, to become
overpersonal and uncertain and capricious. Yet as one reads the
reports attentively he cannot doubt that in action it is an important
engine of justice; that it is a needed safety valve in the working of
our legal system.

At common law the chief reliance for individualizing the application
of law is the power of juries to render general verdicts, the power to
find the facts in such a way as to compel a different result from that
which the legal rule strictly applied would require. In appearance
there has been no individualization. The judgment follows necessarily
and mechanically from the facts upon the record. But the facts found
were found in order to reach the result and are by no means
necessarily the facts of the actual case. Probably this power alone
made the common law of master and servant tolerable in the last
generation. Yet exercise of this power, with respect to which, as Lord
Coke expressed it, "the jurors are chancellors," has made the jury an
unsatisfactory tribunal in many classes of cases