A Job For Jurisprudence
| Date | 01 April 1944 |
| Published date | 01 April 1944 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1944.tb00968.x |
42
MODERN LAW REVIEW
April,
1944
but considerable development of some department of government, whether
Ministry of Production or the Treasury, which
is
the need implicit in such
questions.
It
implies, too, the need not for a narrow, pedestrian financial
mastery, but for the use of the money measuring-rod by policy-making
authority properly equipped with economic information and research
services, and
so
able to look at all relevant facts and frame policy to meet
them.
But to see the need for this
as
well as to enable
it
to be done
a
term
must be set to the notion that independence
or
irresponsibility are worthy
ends for those charged with the creation or maintenance of public services.
We cannot do better than revert to the conclusions of successive reports,
each pointing to the essential: integration at the level of Parliamentary
and Ministerial accountability.
“
We regard with apprehension,” said
the MacDonnell Commission,80 “the creation
of
any authority having
large public funds at its disposal which is outside effective Ministerial
control and Parliamentary criticism.”
‘‘
There should
be
no omission,”
reported the Haldane Machinery
of
Government Committee,81 “in the
case of any particular service, of those safeguards which Ministerial
responsibility to Parliament alone provides.” The Bridgeman Committee
repeated
:a2
“We consider that the public have
a
right to the influence
which Parliamentary discussion and control alone can give.” And these
remarks are true of all such bodies, not excluding others not dealt with
here-such as the British Council, the Unemployment Assistance Board,
or the Forestry Commission--except only perhaps bodies of trustee or
quasi- j udicial function.
H.
R.
G. GREAVES.
4th
Report,
pp.
76-7.
Cmd.
4149
of
1931-2.
para.
49.
81
Cmd.
9230
of
1918.
p.
11.
A
JOB
FOR
JURISPRUDENCE
T is difficult to define jurisprudence since the professing experts have
not themselves agreed on
a
definition, but broadly speaking, and
begging all the questions which the experts like to fire
at
each other,
it appears to be accepted that jurisprudence
is
the science of law. At
any rate, you cannot have any jurisprudence until you have got some law
to
work
on
;
and you cannot have any law until you have got some fairly
well defined rules of conduct
;
and rules of conduct have no legal validity
until you have evolved some machinery for enforcing them; and, finally,
the machinery is of little use unless
it
is kept in constant and efficient
running order. What strikes one about this catalogue
is
that the one and
only item you can do without
is
jurisprudence.
If
you have once got a
set of reasonably acceptable rules and a machinery for applying them
which really works you do not need any jurisprudence.
The suggestion,
I
know,
is
that the mere mention of reasonably accept-
able rules necessarily involves jurisprudence, and that
it
is
the very
function of jurists to evolve rules which will answer to that description.
“Law,” to quote Prof.
C.
K.
Allen,’ “is a body of interrelated principles,
and jurisprudence
is
the systematic synthesis of them.
. . .
Law is too
great and too complicated an instrument for blundering improvisation.”
Legal Dutics and Other Essays in Jurisprudence
(1931),
p.
22
I
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