ABSTRACT
The law is regarded as existing to secure the power of contracting freely and the right to exact a performance freely promised as widely as possible. Obviously its important legal institutions are property and contract. Its contribution seems to be the thorough working out of individual rights. Accordingly the philosophy of law in the nineteenth century put individual rights at the foundation of the legal system. Hence the present generation, wrestling with legal institutions and legal doctrines fashioned in other eras, often finds them intrenched, however remote their origin, in nineteenth-century philosophy of law. It is no wonder that a generation of lawyers trained in nineteenth-century philosophy of law has been slow to respond to the modern faith in the efficacy of effort. Used to temper the enthusiasm of a new period of liberalization, the philosophy of law of the last century may yet save us from the excesses of the stage of equity and natural law.
