meaning of every new effort of legal thought is to make these prophecies
more precise, and to generalize them into a thoroughly connected system.
The process is one, from a lawyer's statement of a case, eliminating
as it does all the dramatic elements with which his client's story has
clothed it, and retaining only the facts of legal import, up to the
final analyses and abstract universals of theoretic jurisprudence. The
reason why a lawyer does not mention that his client wore a white hat
when he made a contract, while Mrs. Quickly would be sure to dwell upon
it along with the parcel gilt goblet and the sea-coal fire, is that he
foresees that the public force will act in the same way whatever his
client had upon his head. It is to make the prophecies easier to be
remembered and to be understood that the teachings of the decisions of
the past are put into general propositions and gathered into textbooks,
or that statutes are passed in a general form. The primary rights and
duties with which jurisprudence busies itself again are nothing but
prophecies. One of the many evil effects of the confusion between legal
and moral ideas, about which I shall have something to say in a moment,
is that theory is apt to get the cart before the horse, and consider the
right or the duty as something existing apart from and independent of
the consequences of its breach, to which certain sanctions are added
afterward. But, as I shall try to show, a legal duty so called is
nothing but a prediction that if a man does or omits certain things he
will be made to suffer in this or that way by judgment of the court; and
so of a legal right.

The number of our predictions when generalized and reduced to a system
is not unmanageably large. They present themselves as a finite body
of dogma which may be mastered within a reasonable time. It is a great
mistake to be frightened by the ever-increasing number of reports. The
reports of a given jurisdiction in the course of a generation take up