reserved and decided. After delivering the opinion, Judge Hampton read the following: Notefor Counsel. — " If the counsel should be of the opinion that the question of law has not been reserved in such a manner as to meet the rule laid down by the Supreme Court, they can draw up a formal bill of exceptions, presenting the questions more distinctly, and it will be sealed by the court. ... I make this suggestion by way of caution, inas much as my brother Williams and myself have both been unfortunate, it seems, in our mode of reserving questions. The Supreme Court recently reversed a judgment entered by myself, because the question was not properly reserved. . . . The counsel on both sides understood distinctly the question of law, and argued it with great ability both in this court and in the Supreme Court. Yet Mr. Justice Black, in delivering the opinion of that court, says : ' This was an issue of fact. A jury was called to try it, and each party produced whatever evidence he had to sustain the issue on his part. But the jury to whom the evidence was given were discharged by the court without giving a verdict, or even hinting an opinion on any part of it except the amount of the plaintiff's loss.' In another place he says: 'We review here nothing but what appears on the record. This record is blank.' That must have been a strange kind of blank, indeed, if the learned judge found in it all he thinks he did. Yet it must all be there, for he says they review nothing but what ap pears on the record. He has discovered far more in that blank record than either this court or the learned counsel ever dreamt of. . . . "In another part of the opinion, he says : ' Among the children of Israel it was the hard causes that were brought to Moses, not those which were plain.' I have looked carefully into the practice of that dis tinguished Supreme Judge of Israel, for some light on the subject of reserving questions, but have not been able to find a solitary case, during his admin istration of justice for a period of forty years in the wilderness, in which he reversed the judgment of the inferior courts because the questions were not properly reserved. Nor can I find, after the most careful examination of the ' Lamentations of Jere miah,' any complaint against the judges of Israel for not reserving their questions of law in a more formal manner. . . . "In another part of the learned Judge's review of this blank record, he says : ' We can easily see how this practice crept into the District Court of Alle gheny County.' On what page of the blank record this information is contained is more than I can dis cover. Yet it must all be there, because we are as sured that the Supreme Court reviews ' nothing but what appears on the record.' . . . No complaint was ever uttered by the old Supreme Bench on that subject. But this same learned judge, in a recent opinion
delivered by him in the case of Hole v. Rittenhouse, has explained the reason of the present difficulty about reserved questions. He says : ' But now, new lords, new laws, is the order of the day. The major ity of this court changes on the average once every nine years, without counting the changes by death or resignation.' Thus we see that the difficulty has not arisen from any deviation by this court from the practice of either the children of Israel in the wilder ness, or of any of our predecessors on this bench; and the warning voice of the learned judge given in his opinion in Barney Hole's case tended to confirm my former convictions, that the best method of avoid ing all the evils growing out of these modern inno vations so apt to spring from the frequent changes of the judges is to cling more closely to the ancient doctrine of stare decisis, so strongly recommended by Judge Black. A speedy return, therefore, to the practice of Chief-Justice Moses in the wilderness and of the old Bench of the Supreme Court, in de ciding all the ' hard causes ' brought up to them, without regard to the technical form in which they are reserved, would be the best practical illustration of this valuable precept." — T. S. H.
An Indianapolis correspondent favors us with the following communication on the subject of "Citations": — Editor of the " Green Bag" : Judge Thompson, of St. Louis, has said something in the " Green Bag " about " reporting." Permit me, through the same medium, to say something about works of citation of cases. Simon Greenleaf, I believe, was the pioneer in this class of works, when he got out his "Overruled Cases" in 1838. This was a general work, covering all the English and American reports, of " Cases Overruled, Denied, and Doubted, Arranged Alphabetically by the Plaintiff's Name." Successive editions of this work were printed; and in 1856 Mr. John Townsend revised, enlarged, and published a fourth edition of the work. The author and editor undertook to give the particu lar point upon which the case given was overruled : so that it would be unnecessary to refer to the report when the case was doubted, denied, or overruled. At that early day, as compared with how, the labor of preparing such a volume was a comparatively light one. In 1873 Mr Melville M. Bigelow gave us "An Index of the Cases Overruled, Revised, Denied, Doubted, Modified, Limited, Explained, and Distin guished by the Courts of America, England, and Ireland." In 1887 Mr. Charles F. Williams com piled a supplement for this volume. In this work it was attempted to show in what particular case a
