Procedure

5 July 1804

Ch. [...?] ...?]

3 ''.2.1. Words indeterminate

The speaking of jurisprudential law the following distinctions or division will require to be observed - the one taken from /grounded on/ its connection or disconnection with statutory law; the other from the consideration of the country in which it took its rise.

1. Division of jurisprudential law into self-rooted, and engrafted. When the import and application of a clause or portion of the matter of statutory law has been the subject of contestation in the court of judicature, and the Judge, on the occasion of the decision he pronounces, signifies the sense he ascribes to such clause, the interpretation or construction so put may in so far s it is considered as distinct from the portion of law which it thus interprets, and as constituting in that respect a portion of the matter of jurisprudential law termed a portion of jurisprudential engrafted upon such or such a portion of statutory law. It may be termed self-rooted in the opposite case; viz word has no portion of statutory law to stand upon.

2. Division of jurisprudential (as it statutory) law into nature, or of home-growth and imported or say of foreign growth.

The Roman Law, as to some parts of it at least may furnish an example of a mass of jurisprudential law of foreign growth.

As to the compilation made and published by order of the Roman or rather Grecian Emperor Justinian so far as it extends it may be considered as a mass of statutory law; inasmuch as it has been imagined to a determinate mass of words. Exempting /[...?] made/ this property, and setting aside the unlikely advantage which that property can not but give, in some degree or other to every mass, how ill so ever constructed in other respects, it may be considered as being on a footing with jurisprudential law, involving in a considerable degree all the imperfections that are essential to it.