why a lawyer does not mention that his client wore a white hat
when he made a contract, while Mrs. Quickly would be sure to dwell upon
it along with the parcel gilt goblet and the sea-coal fire, is that he
foresees that the public force will act in the same way whatever his
client had upon his head. It is to make the prophecies easier to be
remembered and to be understood that the teachings of the decisions of
the past are put into general propositions and gathered into textbooks,
or that statutes are passed in a general form. The primary rights and
duties with which jurisprudence busies itself again are nothing but
prophecies. One of the many evil effects of the confusion between legal
and moral ideas, about which I shall have something to say in a moment,
is that theory is apt to get the cart before the horse, and consider the
right or the duty as something existing apart from and independent of
the consequences of its breach, to which certain sanctions are added
afterward. But, as I shall try to show, a legal duty so called is
nothing but a prediction that if a man does or omits certain things he
will be made to suffer in this or that way by judgment of the court; and
so of a legal right.

The number of our predictions when generalized and reduced to a system
is not unmanageably large. They present themselves as a finite body
of dogma which may be mastered within a reasonable time. It is a great
mistake to be frightened by the ever-increasing number of reports. The
reports of a given jurisdiction in the course of a generation take up
pretty much the whole body of the law, and restate it from the present
point of view. We could reconstruct the corpus from them if all that
went before were burned. The use of the earlier reports is mainly
historical, a use about which I shall have something to say before I
have finished.

I wish, if I can, to lay down some first principles for the study of
this body of dogma or systematized prediction which we call the law,
for men who want to use it as the instrument of their business to enable
them to prophesy in their turn, and, as bearing upon the study, I wish
to point out an ideal which as yet our law has not attained.

The first thing for a businesslike understanding of the matter is to
understand its limits, and therefore I think it desirable at once
to point out and dispel a confusion between morality and law, which
sometimes rises to the height of conscious theory, and more