It may be not too much to predict that as the account now stands the chief American contributions to literature and the progress of human thought will prove to have been made in the field of jurisprudence. The writings of Holmes, Cardozo, and Pound have presented the results of a deeper probing into the operation of the legal system than had been before attempted by men bred to the common law, and have presented those results in most instances with a vividness and rare literary charm which are usually alien to the field of abstract speculation. Mr. Chief Justice Cardozo's latest volume [The Paradoxes of Legul Science] consisting of a course of lectures delivered in 1927 on the Carpentier Foundation at Columbia University, adds another item to the anthology of distinguished American contributions to juristic theory.

As the title of the book indicates, the central problem which engages the attention of the Chief Justice is suggested by his observation that the task of the law is to solve antinomies. "The reconciliation of the irreconcilable, the merger of antitheses, the synthesis of opposites, these are the great problems of the law. … We have the claims of stability to be harmonized with those of progress. We are to reconcile liberty with equality, and both of them with order. The property rights of the individual we are to respect, yet we are not to press them to the point at which they threaten the welfare or the security of the many. We must preserve to justice its universal quality, and yet leave to it the capacity to be individual and particular." Therefore the goal of juridical effort is not logical synthesis, but compromise in the effecting of reconciliations.

The Chief Justice addresses himself primarily to the great paradox involved in the need for compromise between stability and progress. It is the task of the judges to build new law, where the building of it is left in their hands, which will be adapted to the needs of society; and the needs of society are changing needs. The author lays down a working rule for judges confronted with such a task: "When changes of manners or business have brought it about that a rule of law which corresponded to previously existing norms or standards of behavior corresponds no longer to the present norms or standards, but on the contrary departs from them, then those same forces or tendencies of development that brought the law into adaptation to the old norms and standards are effective, without legislation, but by the inherent energies of the judicial process, to restore the equilibrium." "The pressure of society invests new forms of conduct in the minds of the multitude with the sanction of moral obligation, and the same pressure working upon the mind of the judge invests them finally through his action with the sanction of law." "At times the new ethos does not mean that there has come into being a new conception of right and wrong. It may mean nothing more than a new impatience, a new restiveness, in the face of old abuses long recognized as wrong. Transition stages there are also when an observer can mark the law in the very process of becoming. It is throwing off a crippling dogma, and struggling for freer motion." "Our course of advance, therefore, is neither a straight line nor a curve. It is a series of dots and dashes. Progress comes per saltum, by successive compromises between extremes."

These compromises are effected by the judges' conception of the demands of justice. This conception must be no purely personal one, but must result from an effort to interpret the morality of the community. "Law accepts as the pattern of its justice the morality of the community whose conduct it assumes to regulate. In saying this, we are not to blind ourselves to the truth that uncertainty is far from banished. Morality is not merely different in different communities. Its level is not the same for all the component groups within the same community. A choice must still be made between one group standard and another. We have still to face the problem, At which one of these levels does the social pressure become strong enough to convert the moral norm into a jural one?" The pressure is exerted on the judges, and the choice is for them to make. "When this pressure has gone so far that it may no longer be resisted, the judges are to say. For they are the interpreters of the social mind, its will, its expectation, its desires." "In order that such a moral claim should become juridical, it must pass through.… the stage of declaration of right. A declaration of right is the admission by organized society that the claim is justified from the public point of view. Organized society may speak in such matters by the voice of its representatives in legislative assemblies. It may speak, at least in our Anglo-American system, by the voice of its judges."

These striking passages steer perhaps the truest and straightest course yet struck between "realists" who insist on the half-truth that social forces dictate law, and Austinians who neglect to notice that the legislative organ in making law is largely influenced by the action of such forces.