litarianism, in common with all
nineteenth-century philosophies of law, was too absolute. Its
teleological theory was to show us what actually and necessarily took
place in lawmaking rather than what we were seeking to bring about.
Its service to the philosophy of law was in compelling us to give over
the ambiguous term "right" and to distinguish between the claims or
wants or demands, existing independently of law, the legally
recognized or delimited claims or wants or demands, and the legal
institutions, which broadly go by the name of legal rights, whereby
the claims when recognized and delimited are secured. Also it first
made clear how much the task of the lawmaker is one of compromise. To
the law-of-nature school, lawmaking was but an absolute development
of absolute principles. A complete logical development of the content
implicit in each natural right would give a body of law adequate to
every time and place. It is true an idea of compromise did lurk behind
the theory of the metaphysical jurists in the nineteenth century. But
they sought an absolute harmonizing rather than a working compromise
for the time and place. Conflicting individual wills were to be
reconciled absolutely by a formula which had ultimate and universal
authority. When we think of law as existing to secure social
interests, so far as they may be secured through an ordering of men
and of human relations through the machinery of organized political
society, it becomes apparent that we may reach a practicable system of
compromises of conflicting human desires here and now, by means of a
mental picture of giving effect to as much as we can, without
believing that we have a perfect solution for all time and for every
place. As the Neo-Kantians put it, we may formulate the social ideal
of the time and place and try juristic problems thereby without
believing ourselves competent to lay out a social and political and
legal chart for all time. As the Neo-Hegelians put it, we may discover
and formulate the jural postulates of the civilization of the time and
place without assuming that those postulates are a complete and final
picture of ultimate law, by which it must be measured for all time.

Social utilitarianism has stood in need of correction both from
psychology and from sociology. It must be recognized that lawmaking
and adjudication are not in fact determined precisely by a weighing of
interests. In practice the pressure of wants, demands, des