Popularizing the Rule of Law: Sheldon Amos and the International Scientific Series, 1874 to 1909

Amos published the first edition of Science of Law with Appleton's International Scientific Series in 1874. He emphasized the roles of empirical assembly and inductive synthesis in legal generalization, the capacity of juridical information to be presented in a systematic manner, Anglo-American common law's independence from politics, metaphysics and morality, and the facilitative role of law in social evolution. Amos thus traded on the conventions of the Victorian natural sciences to appeal to popular sentiment and thereby garner support for judge-made law and the rule of law, but the scientific conventions on which he traded had typically been filtered through and reconfigured by popular understandings of those sciences.