The Nature And Sources Of The Law

John Chipman Gray (1839-1915) spent the greater part of his professional life as a professor at Harvard Law School where he taught property, trusts and future interests. The Nature and Sources of the Law was first published in 1909. The book is divided into two parts which respectively look at 'Nature' and 'Sources'.In Part I, Gray warns that the study of jurisprudence, in isolation, could lead to dogmatism. Rather he advocates the structure offered by common law with its reliance on flexible interpretations of statutes, the use of all relevant cultural inputs and a highly adaptable approach to the resolution of disputes.Gray, in Part II, turns his attention to sources of the law, and begins with statutes. Here he asserts that judges are the ones who actually turn into law, going against the conventional scholarship that judges merely interprets statutes. He also extensively examines the influence of tradition and the common law.

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First published in 1909 and then again in 1997. John Chipman Gray (1839-1915) spent the greater part of his professional life as a professor at Harvard Law School where he taught property, trusts and future interests. The Nature and Sources of the Law was first published in 1909. The book is divided into two parts which respectively look at 'Nature' and 'Sources'. In Part I, Gray warns that the study of jurisprudence, in isolation, could lead to dogmatism. Rather he advocates the structure offered by common law with its reliance on flexible interpretations of statutes, the use of all relevant cultural inputs and a highly adaptable approach to the resolution of disputes. Gray, in Part II, turns his attention to sources of the law and begins with statutes. Here he asserts that judges are the ones who actually turn into law, going against the conventional scholarship that judges merely interprets statutes. He also extensively examines the influence of tradition and the common law.

Excerpt from The Nature and Sources, of the Law Some fifty years ago I came across a copy of Austin's "Province of Jurisprudence Determined," then little read in England, and all but unknown in this country; and since then, although my work has been mainly on other lines, the subject has seldom been for long wholly out of my mind. I put my ideas into substantially their present shape a dozen years ago; I have held them in abeyance more than the prescribed nine years; but I doubt if they would ever have been published had not Columbia University done me the honor of applying the lene tormentum of an invitation to give a course of lectures on the Carpentier Foundation. The lectures were read at Columbia University in the spring of 1908. They have been here divided into thirteen chapters, but no attempt has been made to change the familiar style they bore in delivery. The use of homely expressions and examples helps one to keep a grasp on the facts of daily life, the loss of which is the chief danger in the moral sciences. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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