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4 Temp. L.Q. 311 (1929-1930)
The Improvement of the Law

handle is hein.journals/temple4 and id is 321 raw text is: Temple Law Quarterly Published Four Times During the School Year by the Temple University School of Law in the Public Ledger Building, Independence Square, Philadelphia VOL. IV AUGUST, 1930 No. 4 THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE LAW* Our attitude to the problem of improvement of the law will necessarily depend a great deal upon our conception of the source of authority of the law itself. When Moses brought to his people the Ten Commandments on their tables of stone after his conference with Jehovah upon Mount Sinai, suggestions for im- provement of the law were not in order. Nor could they be in order thereafter if the law is thought of as promulgated by Divine authority. Supernatural source of authority for law has its ad- vantages. Granted the belief in the authority by those governed, the extra human sanction will relieve much of the problem of law enforcement. We see all this in present-day descriptions of the life of primitive people. We have not been without it in the common law. In a life of Williams, Lord Keeper in King Charles's first parliament, the Lord Keeper is recorded as addressing the House of Commons in this fashion: . . The king doth now in public recommend to his judges, and by them to the professors and students of the laws, to wit, that they would spend their time, as their fore- fathers did, in the ancient common laws of the kingdom, and not altogether, as the complaint hath been of late, in statutes, new cases and modern abridgements. In the former studies you meet with reason created by God, in the latter with opinion only, in- vented by man. ' *Address delivered at the thirty-sixth annual convention of the Pennsylvania Bar Association. 'Hacket's Life of Williams (1693), pt. 2. I p-i2. (310

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