The present volume is the second work published under the imprint ofthe Yale University Press in memory of Arthur P. McKinstry, who diedin New York City, July 21, 1921. Born in Winnebago City, Minnesota, onDecember 22, 1881, he was graduated from Yale College in 1905, and in1907 received the degree of LL.B. magna cum laude from the Yale LawSchool, graduating at the head of his class. Throughout his career atYale he was noted both for his scholarship and for his active interestin debating, which won for him first the presidency of the FreshmanUnion and subsequently the presidency of the Yale Union. He was alsoClass Orator in 1905, and vice-president of the Yale Chapter of PhiBeta Kappa.
Following his graduation from the School of Law he entered upon thepractice of his profession in New York City and early met with thesuccess anticipated for him by his friends,—his firm, of which he wasthe senior member, being recognized at the time of his death as amongthe most prominent of the younger firms in the city. He was counselfor the Post-Graduate Hospital of New York, the Heckscher Foundationfor Children, of which he was also a trustee, and from 1912 to 1914served as associate counsel to the Agency of the United States in theAmerican and British Claims Arbitration. By his untimely death the barof the City of New York lost a lawyer outstanding for his ability,common sense, conscientiousness, and high sense of justice; and YaleUniversity lost an alumnus of whom she was proud, who gave freely ofhis time and thought to his class of 1905, to the development of theYale School of Law, and to the upbuilding of the Yale UniversityPress, which he served as counsel.
This book is a written version of lectures delivered before the LawSchool of Yale University as Storrs Lectures in the school year1921-1922.
A metaphysician who had written on the secret of Hegel wascongratulated upon his success in keeping the secret. One who essaysan introduction to the philosophy of law may easily achieve a likesuccess. His hearers are not unlikely to find that he has presentednot one subject but two, presupposing a knowledge of one and givingthem but scant acquaintance with the other. If he is a philosopher, heis not unlikely to have tried a highly organized philosophicalapparatus upon those fragments of law that lie upon the surface of thelegal order, or upon the law as seen through the spectacles of somejurist who had interpreted it in terms of a wholly differentphilosophical system. Looking at the[Pg 10] list of authorities relied uponin Spencer's Justice, and noting that his historical legal data weretaken from Maine's Ancient Law and thus came shaped by thepolitical-idealistic interpr