ABSTRACT
Legal institutions, unlike many social phenomena, present a reasonably well-defined and discrete setting in which to study the history of social rules. In actual legal systems the multiplicity of judges will rarely have nearly convergent, let alone identical, intentions and beliefs. The unity of intention so evident in a single-judge system appears less likely in actual legal systems. The social rules that constitute legal practice itself arguably serve as a major factor in unifying the diverse aims of a multiplicity of judges into a coherent legal system. The inadequacy of the jurisprudential account of change in part explains the emergence of evolutionary theories of common law change. Evolutionary models of the common law distinguish between the judicial process and the legal process. The legal process is more complex; it integrates the "pressures" for change controlled by the litigants with the judicial process.
