tracing legal principles through the headnotes of the decisions, such a syllabus gives the searcher almost no aid at all. The law does not depend upon facts, though legal judgments consist in the application of the law to facts. The mind cannot easily grasp and retain a numerous collection of facts, and the law cannot be taught by teaching the conclusions of courts upon the peculiar col lections of facts which have arisen in differ ent cases. The so-called " case lawyer " is a lawyer who is made by this process. His professional work consists in endeavoring to find a case " on all fours " on its facts with the particular case which he has in hand; and when he finds such a case he cites it to the court with the confident assurance that, because some other court has decided upon precisely the same facts, according to his way of thinking, this court will do so. But it is rare indeed that two cases are ever precisely alike. When therefore the case lawyer fails to find a case on all fours with the one he has on hand, he is helpless, because he has not trained his mind to the discovery of legal principles and to their application to facts. He has not kept in mind the obser vation of Mr. Chief-Justice Best : — "As no two cases are ever alike in all respects, the best way is, to extract a principle from the analogous decisions." 1 In this regard the head-notes in John son's New York Reports are to be espe cially commended. The same may be said of the head-notes of Gray's Reports; and in deed this encomium is deserved by most of the Massachusetts reports, and by those of Wendell, Denio, and indeed of most of the early New York reporters. The reports of Mr. Freeman, of the Supreme Court of Illinois, are in this respect to be commended. I have already criticised his head-notes as furnishing too much in quantity, — that is, I blame them for giving the dicta as well as the decision; but the propositions of law as 1 Knight v. Hunt, 5 Bing. 432, 434.
stated therein are almost uniformly well drawn. They are the work of a skilful hand; and although it is well known that Mr. Freeman has at times been obliged to employ assistants to aid him in getting out the rapidly multiplying volumes of decisions of that court, yet, like General Grant, he has been skilful in selecting his assistants, and has evidently kept them under a judicious supervision. We should expect to find models of reportorial work in the decisions of the Federal Court of last resort; but unfortunately as much bad work has probably been done in reporting the decisions of that court, as in reporting those of any respectable court in the Union. Not to speak of his predeces sors, the head-notes of the sixteen volumes of Peters were abominable. He seems to have been incapable of extracting from the decision the question decided, or even of formulating in his own language legal prin ciples; but his head-notes often consist of a string of argument almost copied from the language of the judge who wrote the opinion. It is hard to understand how a court of that dignity, sensitive of its reputation, could have kept such a stick in such an office for so many years. His immediate successor, Howard, was not much better; but his suc cessor, Jeremiah Black, was a lawyer of emi nent ability, who had been Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, and Attorney-General of the United States. His head-notes, though not always brief, are lawyer-like statements of what the court decided. His work as a reporter was un fortunately confined to two volumes. His successor, John William Wallace, had a very theatrical way of stating the facts of cases. In fact, it is scarcely out of the way to say that his mental tendency was toward gush and garrulousness. But unless I am mis taken, his head-notes, though possibly too full, never missed the point. I assume, how ever, that they were not liked by some of the judges, especially by Justices Field, Miller, and Bradley, who in important cases, as I
