Evidently the relation of the judge toward the statutory law is quite different from his relation toward the lawyers' law. The statute gives him commands, the lawyers' law offers instruction. Lawyers' law derives its force from its foundation in a just judgment regarding existing relations, while the statute derives it from the power of the government. Courts receive commands from the legislative power having authority over them, but acquire information wherever they find it. English courts cite unhesitatingly American decisions, American courts cite English ones - but to base a judgment on a foreign statute would be utterly out of the question.5 In the same manner the Roman lawyers' law has been utilized wherever it was taken simply as "written reason," as in Scotland, to some extent in the Low Countries and in France, and even in Germany until the rise of the learned judiciary.

But modern bureaucratic judges, as was shown above, have lost, in consequence of their official position and their whole legal training, all pyschological capacity to find in a legal rule anything but a command. Thus the development of a learned governmental judiciary brought about a tendency to treat lawyers' law as if it were of the same nature as statutory law. In this manner what originally was merely instruction was raised to the rank of a command.