PRIVATE

3 July 1807

3

Letter V

II. Litigation promoted

Directions and Instructions employed or in the fabrication or strengthening of the above engines - principally by means of a precedent use of the devices mentioned in Letter I.

1. For creation and preservation of uncertainty.

1. Seat of the uncertainty the matter of law - contrivances respecting the form.

1. Keep jurisprudential i.e. fictitious from being converted into statutory i.e. real law (Device).

2. Keep the materials of jurisprudential law in as perfect a state of latentcy[?] and uncognosibility as possible.

3. Keep them by means of fiction and jargon (Devices │ │) in a state of as perfect unintelligibility as possible.

4. In whatever patches the materials of the body of statute law make their appearance, keep them in as high a state of obscurity and ambiguity as the nature of law in that form admitts: and this as well in respect of method as of phraseology, and terminology.

II. - Contrivances respecting the matter or substance -

5. To baffle conjecture, be careful to place and preserve the materials of jurisprudential law, and in particular the alledged reasons on which the several decisions are grounded, in as compleat a state of irrationality and absurdity, as the state of the laws in respect of knowledge, will admitt.

6. In particular in regard to contract, (testaments and other conveyances included) cooks up the general rule by which the force of law is given to them, and besides[?] taking care, that it shall never have any determinate assemblage of words for the expression and fixation of it, clog it by exceptions, limitations, conditions and distinctions, as numerous as irrational, and thence as unconjecturable as possible.

7. By constructions as forced, or what is better, as fully in the teeth both of letter and spirit as the legislature will endure, extend on every favourable occasion to statutory the uncertainty so essentially inherent in jurisprudential law.

8. Apply to all contracts of the principle of nullification (Device │ │), and that on occasions as numerous, and on grounds as frivolous, and irrational, and thence as unconjecturable, as the laws[?] will endure.