PREFACE.
The following Essay was originally published under the title of "A Compend of Lectures on the Aims and Duties of the Profession of the Law, delivered before the Law Class of the University of Pennsylvania." A portion of it had been read by the author as an Introductory Lecture at the opening of the Fifth Session of the Law Department of that Institution, October 2d, 1854. The young gentlemen, alumni, and students of the school, who were present on that occasion, requested a copy for publication, in order that each of them might possess a memento of their connection with the Institution. The author preferred to publish the entire Compend than merely a part of it. He hesitated much in doing so, because the questions discussed are difficult, and opinions upon them variant, and he could scarcely hope that he had in every case succeeded in just discrimination. A review of the matter now, when a second edition has been called for, has suggested, however, no important change in the principles advanced, though a few additions have been made, some inaccuracies corrected, and an introduction upon the importance of the profession, in a public point of view, prefixed.
G. S.
INTRODUCTION.
The dignity and importance of the Profession of the Law, in a public point of view, can hardly be over-estimated. It is in its relation to society at large that it is proposed to consider it. This may be done by showing its influence upon legislation and jurisprudence. These are the right and left hands of government in carrying out the great purposes of society. By legislation is meant the making of law—its primary enactment or subsequent alteration. Jurisprudence is the science of what the law is or means, and its practical application to cases as they arise. The province of legislation is jus dare—of jurisprudence, jus dicere. The latter is entirely in the hands of lawyers as a body—the former almost entirely.
Legislation is indeed a nobler work than even jurisprudence. It is the noblest work in which the intellectual powers of man can be engaged, as it resembles most nearly the work of the Deity. It is employed as well in determining what is right or wrong in itself—the due proportion of injuries and their remedies or punishments—as in enforcing what is useful and expedient. How wide the scope of such a work! The power of society over its individual members, or, in other words, sovereignty, which is practically vested in the legislature, is a type of the Divine power which rules the physical and moral universe. "There is one Lawgiver," says the Apostle James. Not that the Supreme Being is the sole universal lawgiver in the sense of a creator of law, whose will alone determines the boundaries of right and wrong. God is the creator of the beings who are the subjects of law. He is the author of law—the one lawgiver—in the same sense that he, who first discovered a plain figure, may be said to be the author of all theorems, which may be predicated of it. He who first called attention to the curious curve, made by a point in the periphery of a wheel as it turns on the ground, is in a certain sense the discoverer of all the truths, which may be mathematically demonstrated in respect to it.