own interest. All of these forms belong to transition
from the stability of the maturity of law to a new period of growth.
When the idea of the self-sufficiency of law gives way and men seek to
relate jurisprudence to the other social sciences, the relation to
economics challenges attention at once. Moreover in a time of copious
legislation the enacted rule is easily taken as the type of legal
precept and an attempt to frame a theory of legislative lawmaking is
taken to give an account of all law.

Finally, twelfth, there is an idea of law as made up of the dictates
of economic or social laws with respect to the conduct of men in
society, discovered by observation, expressed in precepts worked out
through human experience of what would work and what not in the
administration of justice. This type of theory likewise belongs to the
end of the nineteenth century, when men had begun to look for
physical or biological bases, discoverable by observation, in place of
metaphysical bases, discoverable by philosophical reflection. Another
form finds some ultimate social fact by observation and develops the
logical implications of that fact much after the manner of the
metaphysical jurist. This again results from the tendency in recent
years to unify the social sciences and consequent attention to
sociological theories.

Digression is worth while in order to note that each of the foregoing
theories of law was in the first instance an attempt at a rational
explanation of the law of the time and place or of some striking
element therein. Thus, when the law has been growing through juristic
activity, a philosophical theory of law, as declaratory of
philosophically ascertainable principles, has obtained. When and where
the growing point of law has been in legislation, a political theory
of law as the command of the sovereign has prevailed. When the law has
been assimilating the results of a prior period of growth, a
historical theory of law as something found by experience, or a
metaphysical theory of law as an idea of right or of liberty realizing
in social and legal development, has tended to be dominant. For
jurists and philosophers do not make these theories as simple matters
of logic by inexorable development of philosophical fundamentals.
Having something to explain or to expound, they endeavor to understand
it and to state it rationally and in so doing work out a theory of
what it is. The theory necessarily reflects the insti