ering of human conduct through
politically organized society. For present purposes I am content to
see in legal history the record of a continually wider recognizing and
satisfying of human wants or claims or desires through social control;
a more embracing and more effective securing of social interests; a
continually more complete and effective elimination of waste and
precluding of friction in human enjoyment of the goods of
existence--in short, a continually more efficacious social
engineering.

III

The Application of Law

Three steps are involved in the adjudication of a controversy
according to law: (1) Finding the law, ascertaining which of the many
rules in the legal system is to be applied, or, if none is applicable,
reaching a rule for the cause (which may or may not stand as a rule
for subsequent cases) on the basis of given materials in some way
which the legal system points out; (2) interpreting the rule so chosen
or ascertained, that is, determining its meaning as it was framed and
with respect to its intended scope; (3) applying to the cause in hand
the rule so found and interpreted. In the past these have been
confused under the name of interpretation. It was assumed that the
function of the judge consisted simply in interpreting an
authoritatively given rule of wholly extra-judicial origin by an exact
process of deducing its logically implied content and in mechanically
applying the rule so given and interpreted. This assumption has its
origin in the stage of the strict law in the attempt to escape from
the overdetail on the one hand, and the vague sententiousness on the
other hand, which are characteristic of primitive law. For the most
part primitive law is made up of simple, precise, detailed rules for
definite narrowly defined situations. It has no general principles.
The first step toward a science of law is the making of distinctions
between what comes within and what does not come within the legal
meaning of a rule. But a body of primitive law also often contains a
certain number of sententious legal proverbs, put in striking form so
as to stick in the memory, but vague in their content. The strict law
by means of a conception of results obtained inevitably from fixed
rules and undeviating remedial proceedings seeks relief from the
uncertainty inherent in the finding of a larger content for
overdetailed special rules through differentiation of cases and the
application of legal prov