4 Jan y 1807

Scotch Reform │ │ To L d Grenville

III Facienda

Codification

(3. The third proposition is - that) (except what depends - not on the state of intellectual but on that of the moral faculty /upon intellectual but upon moral causes/) the only real; security that can be given against misdecision on the ground of law - is an operation altogether different from the creation and preservation of those forms by which the technical is distinguished from the natural system of procedure, viz: the giving to the rule of action a real instead of an imaginary existence: the putting not merely the law of procedure the adjective branch of the law but he substantive branch, for that is the branch in operation for this purpose - the putting it throughout into the state of real law, instead of that state of sham law in which so large a part of it remains at present. The perpetual danger of misdecision - or rather the utter /perpetual/ absence of right decision, for where there is not subject /object/ of /for/ adaptation there can be no aptitude proceeds from this - viz: that the rule of action having no determinable assignable words for the expression of it has in fact no existence. The Judge on each occasion feigns a law - acts, decides, as if there were a law to such or such an effect - to an /the/ effect expressible by such and such words - but neither in these words - nor in any other determinable assignable words - has any law been ever made by any body - not by any Judge no Judge so much as pretends ever to make any the least article of law: not by any legislator for if there had been there would have existed in the subject - to the effect in question a portion of real law - thus would not have been either room or pretence for feigning one.