3 March 1808

Letter V

§.4 Reasons

In one of the two assemblies of which the legislative body is composed - in the House of Lords, when on the comparatively minute scale of an individual question arising out of an individual suit, concerning the property of some individual object such as a piece of land, a decision comes to be pronounced, here at any rate reasons, and under the very name of reasons, and those rendered by the operations of the press to a certain degree public, are not grudged.

If these reasons were so many reasons framed and delivered by the Judges of which that highest of all judicatories is composed, they would by the degree of publicity given to them, the practice of thus delivering them, might in a certain degree be productive of the advantages abovementioned as resulting from the practice of annexing reasons to the text of a law such as explanation, controul, and so forth, and of the corresponding portions of jurisprudential law - viz. the general propositions capable of being distilled out of the respective decisions were imaginary, the words of them being left to be chosen by each reader of the reasons for himself - the reasons at any rate, being expressed by so many determinate assemblages of words, would make but some thing real, a sort of tangible and comprehensible mass from which the volatile and incoercible vapour would be to be distilled.