3 March 1808

39

Letter V

§. Reasons

In bringing to view the above cases in the character of precedents in recommendation of the practice of giving reasons for accompaniments to law, I did not mean it was no part of my intention to give the practice of the reasons themselves as a sample, in respect of quality, of the sort of reason which I would wish to see furnished by our proposed sub-legislators, nor of the course pursued in the preparation of those such reasons.

1. Not of the quality - for of about twenty sorts of reasons which under the name of reasons or some term meant to be synonymous Lord Coke speaks of as the sources from whence that only estimable part of the law which is in the form of jurisprudential law is deduced, two only or at most three make any the most distant reference to the welfare of those, to whose welfare statute law always professes, and with here and there an exception, is to be directed: and such is the nature of this species of law, that after the prodigious quantity of it that has been thus made declared I should have said with views opposite to those of public utility - with intentions directed to the sanction of the interest if the rest of the community to the interest of the declarers, the grounding it on reasons drawn from the consideration of what otherwise would have been the interest of the community would by the shock given to certainty enhance the mischief instead of remove it.