Reported by jed conrad b medina

was an American scholar of property law and professor at Harvard law school. He also founded the law firm ropes and gray, with law partner john Codman ropes. He was half-brother to U.S Supreme court justice Horace gray.

Gray was a graduate of Boston Latin School. From there, he went on to Harvard university, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1859, and Harvard Law School, where he earned his Law degree in 1861. He was admitted to the bar in 1862, and thereafter served a tour in the Union army in the American civil war

In 1865, after the end of the Civil War, Gray established his law practice in Boston, which would eventually evolve into the modern firm of Ropes and Gray. In 1869, he began teaching at Harvard Law School, first as a lecturer, and became a full professor in 1875. In 1883, he was named Royall Professor of Law, a position he would hold for 20 years. He received honorary doctorate of laws degrees from Yale University in 1894, and from Harvard in 1895. Two years after retiring from teaching, he died at Boston, Massachusetts on February 25, 1915.

Gray wrote two books on future interests, Restraints on the Alienation of Property (1883), and The Rule against Perpetuities (1886). His best known work is his survey of the common law, The Nature and Sources of the Law (1909). Gray's writings were so influential that they are still used in American law schools and cited in law journal to this day.

HistoricalSystematic- proposed to follow the systematic method since it focuses in analysis and relations of some fundamental legal ideas rather than focuses in history or prophesy future development Analytic/dogmatic

Now for what I have called the deontological method of dealing with the Law, the consideration of its fitness or unfitness to meet the needs of society. This is for legislators and the advisers of legislators. How far is it a method to be followed by judges and jurists ? The opinions of judges in the Common Law and of jurists in the Civil Law on what society needs have profoundly influenced the Law, and for the better.

A treatise on Law constructed on this third method would be a Treatise on Legislation rather than on Jurisprudence. All writers on Jurisprudence have, however, employed it incidentally. And this is inevitable. Even Austin, the strictest of the analytic jurists, admits that 'it is impossible to consider Jurisprudence quite apart from Legislation; since the inducements or considerations of expediency which lead to the establishment of laws, must be adverted to in explaining their origin and mechanism."

In these lectures I propose to follow the systematic method and to call your attention to the analy- sis and relations of some fundamental legal ideas, rather than to tell their history or prophesy their future development. Not that I am insensible to the value of historical studies, nor blind to the fact that legal conceptions are constantly changing, yet, to borrow a figure from the shop, it is well at times to take account of stock, to consider and analyze Law in the stage of development which it has reached, although we believe it neither possible nor desirable that the development should not go on in the future.

Normal human being- they have a will, can exercise right through agents, etc Abnormal human being-have no will Supernatural being are those intelligent Animals Juristic ex corporation

A man, therefore, may be bound by a legal duty to do an act, although he cannot possibly do it, and although he does not know that he has been ordered to do it. The exercise of his will, actual or potential, is not necessarily involved in the creation of a legal duty to which he is subject.

The Law of the State or of any organized body of men is composed of the rules which the courts, that is, the judicial organs of that body, lay down for the determination of legal rights and duties

The Law of an organized body, political or other, being the rules laid down by the judicial department of that body, it is now necessary to consider courts or judges ; I use the terms as synonymous. It is, of course, not necessary that a judge be called by that name ; it is the functions which he exercises, and not the name by which he is called, that mark his essential character.

In some primitive communities, the legislative, judicial, and administrative powers are united in the same persons or in a single individual. A judge of an organized body is a man appointed by that body to determine duties and the corresponding rights upon the application of persons claiming those rights. It is the fact that such application must be made to him, which distinguishes a judge from an adminstrative officer.

It is possible, perhaps probable, that men have lived together in certain modes and fashions, have, in other words, lived in society, and yet may not have formed an organized body. But the units of such unorganized bodies may be themselves organisms, and this has in all probability been generally the case. A horde of savages who are in the habit of wandering about together, without king or judge, may be composed of true organisms, families, each with its ruler (alike legislator and judge) and Law. The horde is made up of the family units, and not of the individual human beings who make up the family.

In theology it may be that the chief artificial person is the Church; but in Jurisprudence the chief artificial person is the State. The State is an artificial person created in order that, by assuming it as the entity whose organs are the men engaged in protecting a mass of human beings from external and internal fraud and violence, a unity of operation may be given to those organs. Austin, in his " Province of Jurisprudence Determined " The State, according to him," is usually synonymous with the Sovereign.'

is the science of Law, the statement and systematic arrangement of the rules followed by the courts and of the principles involved in those rules. There are three kinds of Jurisprudence : first, Particular Jurisprudence, or the science of the Law of a particular community ; second, Comparative Jurisprudence, or the comparison of the Law of two or more communities ; third. General Jurisprudence, or the comparison of all the legal systems of the world. Austin says that the appropriate subject of Jurisprudence is positive Law

The first Sources from which the courts of any human society draw the Law are the formal utterances of the legislative organs of the society. a country with a written constitution, the body of persons which enacts the constitution is the supreme legislature all other bodies and persons having legislative powers, including the ordinary Legislature, Congress, Assembly, Cortes, are subordinate to it.

The second source of the Law, that is, of the rules by which the courts govern their action, is to be found in Precedents. Precedent has a very wide meaning. It covers everything said or done which furnishes a rule for subsequent practice, especially in matters of form or ceremony COURTS MAKE EX POST FACTO LAW

There are four questions under the English Law as to Precedents to consider : 1. How great is the authority of a decision in the court which made it, or in a court of coordinate jurisdiction ? 2. Is there any court which is absolutely bound by its own decisions ? 3. Does a lower court ever decide in opposition to a higher court of appeal ? 4. Can decisions of the courts be properly considered as sources of Law ?

. A third source of Law, and one of great importance, is found in the opinions of experts. Sometimes these opinions have been taken up by the legislative organ of a community and published as part of the Statute Law. The most familiar and striking instance of this was when Justinian compiled the Digest from the treatises of the Jurists.

Custom is another of the sources of the Law. The courts have adopted certain rules, not because any statutes have required them to do so, not because there were any precedents for such rules in the reports of decided cases, not because they found any doctrine calling for the laying down of the rules in the writings of jurists, not because the rules recommended themselves to their moral sense, but because they found them followed, in society at large, or in some parts of it, in the intercourse of the members of the society with each other. Thus, in the Common Law, three days' delay in payment, called days of grace, are allowed on bills of exchange.

When a case comes before a court for decision, it may be that nothing can be drawn from the sources heretofore mentioned; there may be no statute, no judicial precedent, no professional opinion, no custom, bearing on the question involved, and yet the court must decide the case somehow; the decision of cases is what courts are for.

And I do not know of any system of Law where a judge is held to be justified in refusing to pass upon a controversy because there is no person or book or custom to tell him how to decide it. He must find out for himself; he must determine what the Law ought to be ; he must have recourse to the principles of morality.

Theories on The Nature of Law

The first theory is made up of the commands of the sovereign. This is Austin's view. "Every Positive Law," he says, "obtaining in any community, is a creature of the Sovereign or State; having been established immediately by the monarch or supreme body, as exercising legislative or judicial functions; or having been established immediately by a subject individual or body, as exercising rights or powers of direct or judicial legislation, which the monarch or supreme body has expressly or tacitly conferred ."1

The second theory on the nature of Law is that the courts, in deciding cases, are, in truth, applying what has previously existed in the common consciousness of the people.

third theory of the Law remains to consider. That theory is to this effect: The rules followed by the courts in deciding questions are not the expression of the State's commands, nor are they the expression of the common consciousness of the people, but, although what the judges rule is the Law, it is putting the cart before the horse to say that the Law is what the judges rule.

This theory concedes that the rules laid down by the judges correctly state the Law

COURTS MAKE EX POST FACTO LAW That reason is the unwillingness to recognize the fact that the courts, with the consent of the State, have been constantly in the practice of applying, in the decision of controversies, rules which were not in existence and were, therefore, not knowable by the parties when the causes of controversy occurred

Legal realism can roughly be characterized by the following claims: the class of available legal materials is insufficient to logically entail a unique legal outcome in most cases worth litigating at the appellate level (the Local Indeterminacy Thesis); in such cases, judges make new law in deciding legal disputes through the exercise of a lawmaking discretion (the Discretion Thesis); and

judicial decisions in indeterminate cases are influenced by the judges political and moral convictions, not by legal considerations.