Generally, so
far as he is concerned, it is going to be of man, for every
official finds that the letter of the law works an injustice
many times out of a hundred. If he is worth his salary he
will try to temper justice with mercy. If he is human he will
endeavor to accomplish justice as he sees it so long as the
law can be stretched to accommodate the case. Thus, inevitably
there is a conflict between the law and its application. It
is the human element in the administration of the law that
enables lawyers to get a living. It is usually not difficult
to tell what the law is; the puzzle is how it is going to be
applied in any individual case. How it is going to be applied
depends very largely upon the practical side of the matter and
the exigencies of existing conditions.
It is pretty hard to apply inflexibly laws over a hundred
years old. It is equally hard to police a city of a million
or so polyglot inhabitants with a due regard to their
theoretic constitutional rights.
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