Mr. Pound, in a series of articles on “The Scope and Purpose of Sociological Jurisprudence” in the Harvard Law Review (1910-1912), points out that it was an epoch-making moment when attention began to be turned from the nature of law to its purpose. The old conception of law was that “new situations are to be met always by deductions from old principles.” The new school (headed by Jhering) believe that “law is a product of conscious and increasingly determinate human will.” “Legal doctrines and legal interests do not work themselves out blindly, but have been fashioned by human wants to meet human needs.” Before Jhering the theory of law had been individualistic; Jhering’s is a social theory of law. “The eighteenth century conceived of law as something which the individual invoked against society; ... Jhering taught that it was something created by society through which the individual found a means of securing his interests, so far as society recognized them.” And Jhering called his a jurisprudence of realities; he wanted legal precepts worked out and tested by results. For instance, if a rule of commercial law were in question, the search should be for the rule which best accords with and gives effect to sound business practice.[48] So, Mr. Pound tells us, the idea of justice as the maximum of individual self-assertion, which began to appear at the end of the sixteenth century and reached its highest development in the nineteenth century, began to give way towards the end of the nineteenth century to the new idea of the end of law. Modern jurists have come to consider the working of law more than its abstract content; they lay stress upon the social purposes which law subserves rather than upon sanction.[49] Mr. Pound then shows us that Gierke’s theory of association “became as strong an attack upon the individualistic jurisprudence of the nineteenth century upon one side as Jhering’s theory of interests was upon another.” The “real personality” of the group is plainly expounded by Gierke, that it is not a legal fiction, that is that the law does not create it but merely recognizes that which already exists, that this “real person” is more than an aggregation of individuals, that there is a group will which is something real apart from the wills of the associated individuals. Thus German jurists recognize the principle of “community.” The theory of Vereinbarung, as expounded by Jellinek,[50] is also a recognition of the fact that one will can be formed from several. The present tendency to work out the law of association through the study of the group is marked and significant.