own mind through laborious years? Who is hampered in accepting clients' cases by the felt necessity of understanding them before hand? Such scruples are as obsolete as the lucubrationes viginti annorum that produced them, and the books of Fortescue and Littleton that were the fruits of such slow processes. Do not the Annual Digests reproduce the entire body of the law with the regularity, though not quite the sameness, of the Almanac, so that a fresh authority may be found for actio personalis moritur cum persona, or nudum pactum non gignit actionem, without recalling the hundreds of previous authorities to the same point, and even without the necessity of knowing Latin? The young lawyer has only to insert his thumb in the convenient cavity which forms the last great advance in legal science (prior to my own), and he will pull out a juridical plum with the celerity and ease of the celebrated J. Horner, and can say, like him, "What a great [lawyer] am I! " Or if, with that modesty which has always been characteristic of genius, he shrinks from trusting to his own "rule o' thumb," he has only to send his question to a legal intelligence office, with a very moderate fee, and he will receive by return of mail his ready-made brief. Nay, some of our legal contemporaries have even opened such an office on the mutual plan, and by the modest expenditure of a postage stamp he may find in the next issue a selection of briefs to choose from. All these recent improvements show the direction in which American jurisprudence is moving, as they show the immeasurable distance that separates us already from the laborious methods of Kent and Story. It requires only the genius of a—name which the writer is altogether too modest to mention to point out the happy goal to which all these various paths lead.
Briefly, then, I propose very soon to publish, for the benefit of my professional brethren, a series of "Tables" (ut supra), modelled as nearly as possible on those for the construction of Latin verses, in which a young lawyer may find, in the left-hand column, arranged under convenient rubrics, every legal term on which a brief will be required in the ordinary course of practice. These are easily ascertained from the Digests aforesaid, or by study of the full-faced type in the Reports of the last improved pattern. To save space, I had thought of combining the minor points under more general ones, or what are known as "principles." But, on reflection, this appears to be a departure from the unity and scientific precision of the plan. There may be differences of opinion upon principles, since they are only ascertained by mental exercises, but each point is determined by its page and number in the Digest. Moreover, it is a worthy object to make access to the bar as easy to all aspirants as possible; and while I would not presume to fix the limit beyond which admission cannot go, I think it may safely be assumed that at least for a generation to come all lawyers will be familiar with the alphabet, and a strictly alphabetic arrangement is therefore preferable.
In the second and third columns of each table will be placed the points and authorities for plaintiff and defendant, respectively. I think this will sufficiently distinguish them. I had thought of printing them in different colors,—such as green for the former, and blue for the latter,—in order to guard against even the possibility of mistake in the rapid transcription of arguments, which I trust will be possible when the profession have learned to use the tables. It is well, too, to consider that under this plan the preparation of briefs may often be left to the young lady who manipulates the typewriter, or, in the hurry of a large practice, to the office-boy, to whom such external marks will be as useful as the skull and bones placed on morphine, etc., is to the druggist's errand-boy. But I am not quite satisfied whether the use of colors would be consistent with that professional etiquette which is one of our proudest inheritances from the mother country.
