problems of the possibility of making interests effective
through governmental action, judicial or administrative. But the first
question was one of the wants to be recognized--of the interests to be
recognized and secured. Having inventoried the wants or claims or
interests which are asserting and for which legal security is sought,
we were to value them, select those to be recognized, determine the
limits within which they were to be given effect in view of other
recognized interests, and ascertain how far we might give them effect
by law in view of the inherent limitations upon effective legal
action. This mode of thinking may be seen, concealed under different
terminologies, in more than one type of jurist in the last three
decades.

Three elements contributed to shift the basis of theories as to the
end of law from wills to wants, from a reconciling or harmonizing of
wills to a reconciling or harmonizing of wants. The most important
part was played by psychology which undermined the foundation of the
metaphysical will-philosophy of law. Through the movement for
unification of the social sciences, economics also played an important
part, especially indirectly through the attempts at economic
interpretation of legal history, reinforcing psychology by showing the
extent to which law had been shaped by the pressure of economic wants.
Also the differentiation of society, involved in industrial
organization, was no mean factor, when classes came to exist in which
claims to a minimum human existence, under the standards of the given
civilization, became more pressing than claims to self-assertion.
Attention was turned from the nature of law to its purpose, and a
functional attitude, a tendency to measure legal rules and doctrines
and institutions by the extent to which they further or achieve the
ends for which law exists, began to replace the older method of
judging law by criteria drawn from itself. In this respect the thought
of the present is more like that of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries than that of the nineteenth century. French writers have
described this phenomenon as a "revival of juridical idealism." But
in truth the social utilitarianism of today and the natural-law
philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have only this
in common: Each has its attention fixed upon phenomena of growth; each
seeks to direct and further conscious improvement of the law.

In its earlier form social-uti