PRIVATE

3 March 1808

+ A

On L d Eldons Bill 34

Letter V

§.4. Reasons

Precedents

Jurisprudence

Of the aggregate mass of the entire rule of action, or compleat body of the law, appearing part of it in the shape of statute law, the remainder in the shape of jurisprudential law, the articles which (in so far as existence can be predicated of this subject) exist in the shape of this imaginary sort of law, without any determinate set of words for the expression of them, are, in tenor[?] and [...?] an instance, provided with an accompaniment of reasons: of reasons, or at least assemblages of words on which, by curtesy[?], that denomination is bestowed. Jurisprudential law - i.e. whatsoever part of the rule of action happens to have made its appearance in this phantasmagoric shape, is a sort of law made or rather supposed to have been made by Judges, of a certain rank, on pretence of declaring it.

The conjuncture on which a fragment of the sort of which it is composed comes to be made is that of an individual decision pronounced in the course of a particular cause. Propositions of a general nature being delivered by some Judge at the time when this individual decision comes to be pronounced, to these propositions all or some of them, it happens now and then either in tenor or in purport, under a favourable concurrence of circumstances, to be made public: and these propositions, of which it is known or not known in what words delivered, by whom, in what place, at what time delivered, have the force of real law, for which they are regarded by lawyers as constituting a very advantageous substitute.