12 Aug 1804

Procedure

Ch. non-homologation

''. 8.7. Imposture

"Four" (says he)      I.70. "if it be found that the former decision is manifestly absurd or unjust it is declared, not that such a sentence was bad law, but that it was not law; that is it is not the established custom of the realm, as has been erroneously determined. And hence it is (continues he) hence "it is" (that is from the employment thus given to the word not in preference to the word bad) that our lawyers are with justice "so copious in their encomiums on the reason of the common law; that that they tell in that the law is the perfection of reason that it always intends to conform thereto, and that what is not reason is not law". Such (he scruples not to assure us) is the virtue of a single word not, when thus happily placed: it not only sets lawyers upon pronouncing these encomiums upon the aggregate of all the nonsense and all the injustice that ever has or ever can have issued from their lips or from their hands - but renders their encomiums " just".

Upon the closest and most deliberate scrutiny, in every point in which these two species of law are distinguishable statutory has /differ jurisprudential possesses/ to the degree which has been seen the advantage /has been seen to possess the disadvantage./ No such encomiums nor any thing approaching to them where ever bestowed - no not by the blindest or most bare faced of adulators on the work of the /any/ legitimate legislator: there /yet such/ are the encomiums that Blackstone, the copyist, and the mouthpiece and the acknowledged representative of his tribe is not ashamed to lavish upon the boundless and inextricably intermingled heap of sense and nonsense, of justice and injustice, which under the fiat originally of necessity, since of inadvertence or indolence, or sinister interest to usurp the name of law!