1 The Introductory Portion of the Law
The first portion of the corpus juris is of an introductory nature, consisting of all those rules which by virtue of their preliminary character or of the generality of their application cannot be appropriately relegated to any special department. This introduction may be divided into four parts. The first of them is concerned with the sources of law. It comprises all those rules in accordance with which new law obtains recognition and the older law is modified or abrogated. It is here, for example, that we must look for the legal doctrine as to the operation of precedent, custom, and legislation. The second part of the Introduction deals with the interpretation of law. Here we shall find the rules in accordance with which the language of the law is to be construed, and also the definitions of those terms which are fitly dealt with here, because common to several departments of the law. In the third place the Introduction comprises the principles of private international law—the principles, that is to say, which determine the occasional exclusion of English law from English courts of justice, and the recognition and enforcement therein of some foreign system which possesses for some reason a better claim to govern the case in hand. Fourthly and lastly, it is necessary to treat as introductory a number of miscellaneous rules which are of so general an application as not to be appropriately dealt with in any special department of the legal system.