The Law and the Facts: Presidential Address, Seventh Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association

Woodrow Wilson

American Political Science Review, 1911, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: The life of society is a struggle for law. Where life is fixed in unalterable grooves, where it moves from day to day without change or thought of change, law is also, of course, stationary, permanent, graven upon the face of affairs as if upon tables of stone. But where life changes law changes, changes under the impulse and fingering of life itself. For it records life; it does not contain it; it does not originate it. It is subsequent to fact; it takes its origin and energy from the actual circumstances of social experience. Law is an effort to fix in definite practice what has been found to be convenient, expedient, adapted to the circumstances of the actual world. Law in a moving, vital society grows old, obsolete, impossible, item by item. It is not necessary to repeal it or to set it formally aside. It will die of itself,—for lack of breath,—because it is no longer sustained by the facts or by the moral or practical judgments of the community whose life it has attempted to embody.

Date: 1911
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