Principles of Law and Their Evolution

As the students and faculty of the Yale Law School take part in celebrating my eightieth anniversary, I should like to state to them, and to others, what is the most important idea that I have got out of my fifty-seven years of law study. law teaching, and law practice. It is this: the development of our law-common, statutory, and constitutional-is a part of the continuing evolutionary development of life in society. It is this that prevented the teaching of law for more than forty years from becoming a deadly bore. It is this that has given to the study of new cases-probably more than 50,000 of them-an interest that is no less at eighty than it was at twenty-five