STEVENS AND HAYNES
BELL YARD, TEMPLE BAR
1913
PRINTED AT
THE BALLANTYNE PRESS
LONDON
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
I have endeavoured to make this book useful to more than one class of readers. It is written primarily for the use of those students of the law who are desirous of laying a scientific foundation for their legal education; yet I hope that it will not be found destitute of interest by those lawyers whose academic studies lie behind them, but who have not wholly ceased to concern themselves with the theoretical and scientific aspects of the law. Further, a great part of what I have written is sufficiently free from the technicalities and details of the concrete legal system to serve the purposes of those laymen who, with no desire to adventure themselves among the repellent mysteries of the law, are yet interested in those more general portions of legal theory which touch the problems of ethical and political science.
It will be noticed that occasional passages of the text are printed in smaller type. These are of lesser importance, of greater difficulty, or of a controversial or historical character, and are not essential to the continuity of the exposition.
Certain parts of this book have already been published in the Law Quarterly Review, and I have also incorporated in it the substance of a much smaller work published by me some years ago under the title of “The First Principles of Jurisprudence.” I have not thought it necessary to allude in the text to certain discrepancies in matters of detail between my earlier and later views, and it will be understood that the present work wholly supersedes the earlier, as containing a re-statement of the substance of it in a more comprehensive form.