icle in the March issue of The Juridical Rcvinv, is the course of which the writer, D. Oswald Dykes, says: Hammurabi's Code was certainly the most widely known and most influential legal sys tem of antiquity. Many centuries after its date [220 В. С,], it was used in the lawschools of Babylonia and Assyria. Its in fluence on the Hebrew law is at the present time a subject of lively controversy among Semitic scholars. . . . The most conspicuous characteristic of the provisions of the Code is their concrete and particular form. As in the Roman XII. Tables and the old Ger manic law, no general legal doctrines are here laid down. Each section uses the con ditional form, with a hypothesis stating the facts to be considered, and an apodosis giv ing the "doom" or judgment for that case. This creates a strong probability that this so-called Code was a collection of decisions pronounced by the King or by some other Court, and now classified -and promulgated by royal authority to guide the Courts as binding precedents. ... The preliminary stages of an action are not easy to understand from the glimpses given by extant documents. It seems clear that the jurisdiction of the judges was local, and there are examples of actions dismissed, as we should say, on the plea of "no juris diction." When a diet had been fixed for hearing the cause, the parties went to the temple in which, or at the gate of which, the Court sat. The property in dispute, the "fund in medio" or the title-deeds of the prop erty, was commonly deposited with the deity of the temple. The judgment delivered by the Court was the judgment of the god. The tribunal, however, included besides the judge, a body of assessors who appear to have been head men of the town or village, whose local knowledge makes them some what analogous to the earliest forms of jury in England. These assessors had a judicial function, and assented to the decrees of the Court. . . . Of the pleading before this tribunal we know little. There are some indications that there were written pleadings, which would
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contain the parties' versions of the facts and the statement of their respective claims. Written contracts played a large part in Babylonian litigation, and an action involv ing the reduction of such a writing was con cluded by the formal breaking of the tablet. Oral evidence was given on oath. The for mula is not known, and according to one theory, the recitation was accompanied by the lifting of the hand. There is no indi cation that torture was ever employed to compel testimony or to test it. Examples occur of persons having an interest, and not original parties to the suit, intervening, dur ing its progress. The oral pleadings were apparently conducted by the parties them selves; although the written pleas may have been put in proper technical form by the professional scribes who wrote them'. The decision of the Court was embodied in a document bearing the seals of the judges and the names of witnesses, and it is from such documents, some of them 4000 years old, that we gain most -of our knowledge of the early legal procedure.' Appeal was allowed to the King's Court, where he seems at times to have heard and decided cases in person. Documents now extant record orders of Hammurabi, directing that parties and witnesses should be sent to his Court at Babylon. "Тнн French Jury System"—in criminal cases, for "France has never adopted the principle of jury trials in civil cases"—is described by Judge Simeon E. Baldwin in the April number of the Michigan Law Revint1. After outlining the jury systems from the Revolution to the establishment of the present Republic Judge Baldwin says: Soon after the present Republic was org anized, during the presidency of Thiers, a new system was adopted which is still in force. This was set up by the law of Novem ber i, 1872, and its main proyisions are these: Jurors must be at least thirty years old. They must be in the enjoyment of political and civil rights. Household domestics and servants on wages, convicts, bankrupts, min isters of religion, certain public functionaries.
