n of law functionally by the extent to which they further
or interfere with this interdependence. For the era of legal
self-sufficiency is past. The work of assimilating what had been
received into the law from without during the period of equity and
natural law has been done. The possibilities of analytical and
historical development of the classical materials have been
substantially exhausted. While jurists have been at these tasks, a new
social order has been building which makes new demands and presses
upon the legal order with a multitude of unsatisfied desires. Once
more we must build rather than merely improve; we must create rather
than merely order and systematize and logically reconcile details. One
has but to compare the law of today on such subjects as torts, or
public utilities or administrative law with the law of a generation
ago to see that we are in a new stage of transition; to see that the
juristic pessimism of the immediate past, which arose to save us from
taking in more from without while what had been taken already remained
undigested, will serve no longer; and to see that the jurist of
tomorrow will stand in need of some new philosophical theory of law,
will call for some new philosophical conception of the end of law and
at the same time will want some new steadying philosophical conception
to safeguard the general security, in order to make the law which we
hand down to him achieve justice in his time and place.

II

The End of Law

Making or finding law, call it which you will, presupposes a mental
picture of what one is doing and of why he is doing it. Hence the
nature of law has been the chief battleground of jurisprudence since
the Greek philosophers began to argue as to the basis of the law's
authority. But the end of law has been debated more in politics than
in jurisprudence. In the stage of equity and natural law the
prevailing theory of the nature of law seemed to answer the question
as to its end. In the maturity of law the law was thought of as
something self-sufficient, to be judged by an ideal form of itself,
and as something which could not be made, or, if it could be made, was
to be made sparingly. The idea of natural rights seemed to explain
incidentally what law was for and to show that there ought to be as
little of it as possible, since it was a restraint upon liberty and
even the least of such restraint demanded affirmative justification.
Thus, apart from mere sy