16 March 1808

Letter V

§.6. Reasons

Ends of Justice

Misdecision

In the case and to the extent, of jurisprudential law this standard is [in] respect of its source spurious, in respect of its existence imaginary and fictitious. Spurious, because whatsoever may be the will expressed by it, is the will not of the sovereign but of the Judge: imaginary and fictitious, it being the characteristic and distinguishing property of the rule of action in so far as it is in this form to have no determinate and assignable assemblage of words belonging to it:

In this case, the nature of the case affording no fixt standard of rectitude, every thing being fictitious, it is only in the way of fiction, and by pursuing the original fiction, that any such terms as rectitude of decision or misdecision can be employed. Not that by the unreality of the standard, the mischievousness of the decision, is, in case of misdecision, that is of a bad decision, in any respect a degree lessened. In the form of vapour, a sort of succedaneum to a fixt standard of rectitude is as it were distilled, from a sort of waste, of which particular decisions compose the principal part of the ingredients.