t
in debating, which won for him first the presidency of the Freshman
Union and subsequently the presidency of the Yale Union. He was also
Class Orator in 1905, and vice-president of the Yale Chapter of Phi
Beta Kappa.

Following his graduation from the School of Law he entered upon the
practice of his profession in New York City and early met with the
success anticipated for him by his friends,--his firm, of which he was
the senior member, being recognized at the time of his death as among
the most prominent of the younger firms in the city. He was counsel
for the Post-Graduate Hospital of New York, the Heckscher Foundation
for Children, of which he was also a trustee, and from 1912 to 1914
served as associate counsel to the Agency of the United States in the
American and British Claims Arbitration. By his untimely death the bar
of the City of New York lost a lawyer outstanding for his ability,
common sense, conscientiousness, and high sense of justice; and Yale
University lost an alumnus of whom she was proud, who gave freely of
his time and thought to his class of 1905, to the development of the
Yale School of Law, and to the upbuilding of the Yale University
Press, which he served as counsel.

Preface

This book is a written version of lectures delivered before the
Law School of Yale University as Storrs Lectures in the school
year 1921-1922.

A metaphysician who had written on the secret of Hegel was
congratulated upon his success in keeping the secret. One who essays
an introduction to the philosophy of law may easily achieve a like
success. His hearers are not unlikely to find that he has presented
not one subject but two, presupposing a knowledge of one and giving
them but scant acquaintance with the other. If he is a philosopher,
he is not unlikely to have tried a highly organized philosophical
apparatus upon those fragments of law that lie upon the surface of
the legal order, or upon the law as seen through the spectacles of
some jurist who had interpreted it in terms of a wholly different
philosophical system. Looking at the list of authorities relied
upon in Spencer's Justice, and noting that his historical legal
data were taken from Maine's Ancient Law and thus came shaped by the
political-idealistic interpretation of the English historical school,
it is not difficult to perceive why positivist and Hegelian came to
the same juristic results by radically different methods. On the other
hand, i