292. The mere fact that an Act to indemnify A or an Act sanctioning a
pension to the Speaker is passed by the House of Commons in England
should not lead us conclude that it is law. ‘‘The English Legislature was
originally constituted not for legislative but for financial purposes its primary
function was, not to make laws, but to grant supplies".*
293. J.C. Carter has said that statute books contain vast masses of matter
which, though in the form of laws, are not laws in the proper sense, that
these consist in the making of provisions for the maintenance of public works
of the State, for the building of asylums hospitals, school buses, and a great
variety of similar matter, and that this is but the record of actions of the
State in relation to the business in which it is engaged. According to him, the
State is a great public corporation which conducts a vast mass of business,
and the written provisions for this, though in the form of laws are not
essentially different from the minute os ordinary corporate bodies recording
their actions.†
294. Walter Bagehot has said:
‘‘An immense mass indeed of the legislation is not in the proper language
of jurisprudence legislation at all. A law is a general command applicable to
many cases. The ‘special acts' which crowd the statute book and weary
parliamentary committes are applicable to one case only. They do not lay
down rules acording to which railways shall be made, but enact that such and
such a railway shall be made from this place to that place and they have no
bearing on any other transaction.’’**
295. ‘‘When the authors of books on jurisprudence write about law, when
professional lawyers talk about law, the kind of law about which they are
mainly thinking is that which is found in Justinian's Institutes, or in the
Napoleone Codes or in the New Civil Code of the German Empire, that is to
say, the legal rules which relate to contracts and torts to property, to family
relations nad inhritance or else to law of crimes as is to be found in a Penal
Code."‡
296. John Locke was of the view that ‘legislative authority is to act in a
particular wasy.... (and) those who yield this authority should make only
general rules. They are to govern by promulgated established laws not to be
varied in particular cases.‡‡
297. Perhaps the most exhaustive treatment of the question of the
necessity for generality in law is to be found in ‘‘Jurisprudence, Men and
Ideas of the Law’’ by Patterson (see Chapter V). According to him, the
generality of a law depends upon its being applicable to an indefinite number
of human beings and that is the most significant aspect of law. He said that
an ordinary judgment of a court is not law as a judgment applies only to a
limited number of individuals the parties to the cae. He disagreed with Dr.
Kelsen's statement that the judicial decision is an individual legal norm as
the expression individual legal norm is a self-contradiciton.
298. To Friedmann the most essential element in the concept of law is a
degree of generality:
‘‘The first desideratum of a system for subjecting human conduct to the
governance of rules is an obvious one: there must be rules. This may be
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