tution which it
was devised to rationalize, even though stated universally. It is an
attempt to state the law, or the legal institution of the time and
place in universal terms. Its real utility is likely to be in its
enabling us to understand that body of law or that institution and to
perceive what the men of the time were seeking to do with them or to
make of them. Accordingly analysis of these theories is one way of
getting at the ends for which men have been striving through the legal
order.

What common elements may we find in the foregoing twelve pictures of
what law is? For one thing, each shows us a picture of some ultimate
basis, beyond reach of the individual human will, that stands fast in
the whirl of change of which life is made up. This steadfast ultimate
basis may be thought of as the divine pleasure or will or reason,
revealed immediately or mediately through a divinely ordained
immutable moral code. It may be put in the form of some ultimate
metaphysical datum which is so given us that we may rest in it
forever. It may be portrayed as certain ultimate laws which inexorably
determine the phenomena of human conduct. Or it may be described in
terms of some authoritative will for the time and place, to which the
wills of others are subjected, that will deriving its authority
ultimately and absolutely in some one of the preceding forms, so that
what it does is by and large in no wise a matter of chance. This fixed
and stable starting point is usually the feature upon which the chief
emphasis is placed. Next we shall find in all theories of the nature
of law a picture of a determinate and mechanically absolute mode of
proceeding from the fixed and absolute starting point. The details may
come from this starting point through divine revelation or a settled
authoritative tradition or record, or an inevitable and infallible
philosophical or logical method, or an authoritative political
machinery, or a scientific system of observation, or historically
verifiable ideas which are logically demonstrable to be implications
of the fundamental metaphysically given datum. Third, we shall see in
these theories a picture of a system of ordering human conduct and
adjusting human relations resting upon the ultimate basis and derived
therefrom by the absolute process. In other words, they all picture,
not merely an ordering of human conduct and adjustment of human
relations, which we have actually given, but something more