Living Law of Democratic Society by Jerome Hall, American Democracy And Natural Law by Cornelia Greer Le Boutillier, Human Rights ed. by Unesco (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Living Law of Democratic Society. By JEROME HALL. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill , 1949. Pp. 146, with index. American Democracy And Natural Law. By CORNELIA GREER LE BouTILLIER . New York: Columbia University Press, 1950. Pp. fllO, with index. $3.00., Human Rights. Edited by UNESCO. New York: ~olumbia University Press, 1949. Pp. fl88, with index. $3.75. Jerome Hall set out to make a contribution to legal philosophy and in the process produced a thoroughly honest book of great value. The defects to be found in it are easily understood, and borne with; ~hile he has, with courageous intellectual integrity, thrown off the fever of the intelJectual diseases of his time, some of the disfiguring pock-marks still scar his best ·efforts. The peculiar value of the book lies not only in its open rebellion against the ethical evasiveness that has bankrupted American jurisprudential thought, but also in the manner in which the fight is carried on. In his rebellion, Dr. Hall is only one of a growing multitude of American legal philosophers and practitioners who are in dismay at the beggared condition of legal thought; in his unyielding respect for common sense, for facts, and in the profundity of his analysis he is in a class by himself. Many writers in the law journals have had a fairly clear view of the causes of the present disgrace of jurisprudential thinking, and have stated these causes without mincing words. Take, for example, Abraham Glasser, writing in the Autumn 1950 number of the Journal of Legal Education. " Contemporary writers and teachers in the jurisprudence field, then, have by no means been uninterested in legal value judgments. In the new surge of the last couple of years, however, we have had what to me seems a significant change. Until quite recently, with rare exception, the thinking of nhn-theological contemporary legal philosophers about value choices has pretty generally displayed three characteristics: (1) It has been socially utilitarian-i. e., in one way or another it has asserted that law should serve men's social needs. (2) It has been ethically arbitraryi . e., its concepts of social need have been chosen, arbitrarily chosen (italics not mine), without pretension of undertaking to prove the philosophical validity of the particular value choices or the invalidity of their opposites. (3) it has necessarily therefore been, in philosophical terms, skeptical or at best relativist or reservational about its own value choices. Like secular Existenti<1