It is the nature of the process of the common law that attempts be made to bring logical order into the seeming chaos of legal rules derived from great numbers of individual, unconnected judicial opinions. To some extent, such efforts are indispensable for an understanding of the law, for without them the law would surely be too vast for mortal comprehension. Yet there is an automatic cost associated with such efforts. The soul of a legal system, particularly a system based primarily on case decisions, is its flexibility, its capacity for adaptation to meet subtle distinctions in individual cases-to grow and to shift with new directions in social mood and public policy. A necessary concomitant of any attempt to impose logical consistency and conceptual simplicity on law is a reduction in this vital ingredient of immediacy. All lawyers are familiar with the results of the continuing struggle for legal order and certainty, for "logic" on the one hand, and for policy recognition and flexibility on the other. Legal rules are propounded to apply on a broad scale to many cases; but as time passes, as the policies which originally supported a rule change and application of the rule becomes extended beyond its original intended limits, lawmakers and commentators commence to carve out myriad exceptions to the rule, all in aid of preserving a desired degree of flexibility. In some instances, there are so many exceptions to a rule that the rule tends more to impart confusion and inconsistency to the law than logical simplicity. Conversely, too often a rule becomes so well entrenched, and its application so automatic, that great numbers of cases are decided without any recourse to public policy at all, and the rule becomes the master of policy rather than its servant. When a legal rule reaches either of these extremes in its development, it can safely be asserted that it has ceased to have sufficient utility to justify its continued application. It has either grown so complicated and technical that it defeats its original purpose of conceptual clarity, or it has preserved its own consistency at the expense of the relative disregard of the very issues and daily personal needs and problems which it was designed to resolve. Sometimes, after a long course of development, a rule manages to achieve both extremes simultaneously. The application in Wisconsin of the doctrine of equitable conversion presents an opportunity for an interesting case study of a legal rule which may have outlived its usefulness. This seemingly simple legal rule has received the attention of Wisconsin's courts and legislature for more than a century. The history of this long development should reveal much about the extent to which this rule has proved helpful to the process of law.
