Sheldon Amos
Published: 2019-12-31
Total Pages: 567
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THE systematic study of law is still upon its trial in this country, where the typical barrister is at no pains to conceal his contempt for theory in general and for professors in particulas. It was therefore with some anxiety that we opened a new book upon jurisprudence by a professor of the science. Mr. Amos's work will however, we imagine, do little either to popularize or to retard the study of theoretical law, in the history of which its appearance will certainly not mark an epoch. What Mr. Austin did-forty years ago was really a great achievement. Equipped merely with the philosophy of Bentham, with a few chance remarks of writers like Hobbes and Locke, and a somewhat superficial acquaintance with the German civilians, he resolutely thought out for himself a logical system which, in spite of gaps and roughnesses of execution, must ever have a permanent value. He determined, in many respects once for all, the "Province of Jurisprudenee.". With a firm hand he mapped out its boundaries; and, regardless of strangeness of diction or repetition of argument, he elaborated to over-elaboration certain portions of its contents. The limits of the subject having been thus trenchantly drawn by a thinker whose infinite faculty of taking pains approached, as nearly as such a faculty ever can, to genius, it remained for his successors to cultivate methodically and in detail the field which he had enclosed. After the Province of Jurisprudence, the next desideratum was undoubtedly a "Systematic View" of the science; and with this Mr. Amos undertakes to present us. We cannot say that we think the undertaking has been successful, or that Mr. Amos displays those qualities which are essential to success in such a work. To write a systematic view of anything, it is necessary that the writer should possess a systematic mind, and a power of severely restraining it from wandering into irrelevant topics. Such a power of self-restraint is conspicuously absent from the volume before us, more than one-fourth of which is occupied by chapters upon Public and Private International Law, and upon other matters which have but a faint connexion with the main subject of the work. It was doubtless necessary to explain clearly what is meant by international law, but observations upon the Treaty of Paris, the possibility of arbitration, the Geneva Convention, the effect of modern improvements in warfare, the disabilities of women, the exercise of the prerogative of pardon by the Home Secretary, and the French verdict of extenuating circumstances, have hardly a conceivable place in a Systematic View of Jurisprudence.
