Justice & Law Quote by Frederick Pollock

Pollock turns the Common Law into a shrewd, slightly exasperating elder: “a very wise old lady” who somehow can’t always articulate her own wisdom. It’s a flattering personification with an edge. Calling the Common Law “wise” nods to its accumulated, case-by-case intelligence - precedent as lived experience rather than abstract theory. But the second clause is the knife twist: she “still has something to learn in telling what she knows.” The system isn’t condemned for ignorance; it’s chastised for communication. The problem is not substance, but expression.

That’s a judge’s complaint disguised as a compliment. In Pollock’s era, English law was both proud of its evolutionary pragmatism and increasingly uneasy about its sprawl: doctrines dispersed across reports, principles inferred more than stated, rationales retrofitted after the fact. Judges and jurists were trying to make the Common Law legible to itself - to turn instinct into doctrine, habit into rule, outcomes into reasons. Pollock, a major legal scholar as well as a jurist, is winking at the gap between what courts do and what they can convincingly justify.

The subtext is institutional psychology. Common Law “knows” in the sense that it reaches workable answers, but it often speaks in the cramped language of technicalities, fictions, and inherited categories. Pollock’s line is a nudge toward candor and modernization: better reasoning, clearer statement of principles, and an admission that continuity isn’t the same as clarity. Wisdom, he implies, deserves a voice equal to it.