Book Review: The Province and Function of Law

Abstract

IN the maze of currents and cross-currents that characterize contemporary writing on jurisprudence and legal philosophy there are not many points on which common agreement can be found. But one point on which representatives of the most widely disparate views might agree is that Julius Stone has provided us with the best general introduction to jurisprudence that has yet appeared in the English language. This is not to say that Stone has a keener mind or a more fertile imagination or a more felicitous style or a broader scholarship than Austin, Maine, Holmes or Pound. But jurisprudence, despite all the battle-cries and advertisements of the conflicting schools, is a cumulative enterprise like science or music. It is possible for a rational being to grasp the varied insights that Austin, Maine, Holmes, Pound, and many other original thinkers during the past two or three thousand years have contributed to our understanding of law. In science, it is not necessary to reject Euclidean geometry in order to make use of the non-Euclidean geometries of Riemann or Lobachewsky; we can, and do, use all three in different contexts. Just so, one may enjoy Bach and Wagner, or Homer and Swinburne, on the same evening. It is Stone's great merit that he has not accepted the popular picture of legal philosophy as a bad play wherein each actor kills off all his predecessors on the stage. Nor has Stone followed the practice made standard by his revered teacher and one time colleague, Roscoe Pound, of pigeon-holing each legal thinker within a particular century, country, and school, explaining how he got into that particular pigeon-hole, and passing on quickly to the next pigeon-hole. Rather, he has had the insight to appreciate the character of legal philosophy (and of philosophy generally) as a great cooperative human enterprise stretching across many generations, a continuous and cumulative exploration of possible perspectives through which life's many-faceted problems can be viewed. This quality of intellectual tolerance or catholicity that permeates Stone's appreciation of what other thinkers have tried to say is rare enough in contemporary jurisprudence, and important enough for the jurisprudence of the future, to warrant more attention than any of the particular insights which brighten the 982 pages and 3,156 or more footnotes of this volume.