Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/517

NOTES. 501 Quite aside from the defendants' motives, their act probably exceeded the legitimate bounds of competition. In 8 Harvard Law Review i., Mr. Justice Holmes emphasized the fact that these cases are after all decided on broad grounds of public policy, and that such policy is determined by our economic experience. That is true of most judicial legislation. Our experience with labor organ- izations is not as yet very extensive, and the results are not likely to be summed up alike by all judges. Since the principal case a similar deci- sion has been rendered by Kennedy, J. Flood v. Jackson, Q. B. D., March 5. And an interesting New Jersey case in the Recent Cases, page 5 1 o, infra,, is to the same effect. So that the new cause of action seems to be popular. COxMPARATiVE. CITATION OF REPORTS. — The editor of " Legal Bibliog- raphy " has compiled some interesting statistics of the frequency with which the judges of a State cite and rely upon foreign reports. His tables show the result of a count made of the citations in the judgments reported in the current volume of each set of State reports, and of the United States Reports, omitting, of course, the citations by each court of its own decisions. Four jurisdictions are cited beyond comparison more than any others. Two counts, the first taken before the reports of thirteen less important States had been examined, the second the final one, showed the fol- lowing result : — First Count. Final. United States 1137 1669 English 1483 1594 New York 1164 1424 Massachusetts 1120 1268 Next in rank i Pennsylvania 446 JNext in rank|(.^jjf^j^.^ g^^ Seven of the States omitted in the first count were recently admitted ; the other six were States before 1865 (one was of the original thirteen), but it would seem that the greater part of the additional citations came from the reports of the new States, for the additions make two marked changes; they bring the United States Reports up from a poor third to an easy first, and they bring California up from a tie for ninth place to fifth with a showing sixty per cent better than her next competitor. This seems to point, though not surely, to the establishment of a distinct Western school of jurisprudence, which relies chiefly upon the two sets of reports last named, and it suggests an interesting question whether any tendency to uniformity in State jurisprudence may not be prevented or seriously arrested by the presence of two schools, a Western and an Eastern one. To present an accurate result from one point of view, the tables should of course have taken into account the small number of citable cases in the reports of the smaller States. If, for instance, instead of sixteen volumes of Rhode Island, there were one hundred and fifty, as there are of Illinois, and the frequency of citation were maintained, Rhode Island would stand ninth, next but one after Illinois, instead of in her present position of thirty-sixth. From the point of view of a pur- chaser of law books, which is the purpose for which the statistics were compiled, that is just as much her misfortune, although not her fault.