which he was most ashamed of, " not to be reported in full," and the reporter followed the directions of the judges. Under this system some of the best work which the court ever did became buried and lost in the abstracts. I happen now to think of the case of Spaulding v. Suss, abstracted, I think, in 5 Mo. App. This was an opinion written by that laborious and thorough judi cial worker, Robert A. Bakewell, on a very important question constantly arising in the probate law of Missouri. It was a final de cision. The manuscript opinion was con stantly sought for by the profession; and there were many other like instances, until the system was adopted of publishing all the opinions of the court. You cannot suppress the decisions of a court by not reporting them officially, for they will be eagerly taken up by the un official reporters and printed by them, and the fact that they are not officially reported will make the unofficial reports all the more valuable. For example, the fact that the "Atlantic Reporter" contains many deci sions of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and of the Chancery Court of New Jersey which are not officially reported gives an additional value to that series of private reports; and the fact that the Court of Appeals of Kentucky mark a large portion of their judgments " not to be officially re ported," including some of the most valuable of them, aliments and supports a local law journal called the " Kentucky Law Journal," which is found on the shelves of every wellequipped law library in Kentucky. Every Kentucky lawyer feels that he must have this private collection of the reports of his State court of last resort. The moral of all this is that there is but one way to keep down the accumulation of reports of unimportant cases, and that is for the appellate courts to decide such cases without writing any opinions at all. But the difficulty in the way of this is insur mountable. One of the principal objects of
requiring judges to give their reasons for their decisions is to insure careful judicial work, with correct and just results. The work of a court of last resort which decides without giving reasons cannot retain the confidence of the bar or of the public. It would present the condition of judicial work denounced by Mr. Jefferson in one of his letters, of " opinions huddled up in con clave." It would be worse than that; it would be decisions huddled up in conclave without any public reasons given for them at all. Mr. Jefferson thought, and many have thought and still think, that every judge of a court of appeal ought to be re quired to give his reasons for his concur rence or dissent in every case, just as is still done in the British House of Lords and in the English Court of Appeal. If the habit of delivering opinions formally written, cor rected, and concurred in by the whole court, or by a stated number of the judges, be abandoned, and the habit of substituting oral opinions be adopted, then the short hand reporter will be in court with his everready pencil, and these opinions will be taken down and published by the private reporters or by the local law journals, and the profession will be burdened with them, just as they are now burdened with the un official publication of the decisions marked "not to be officially reported." The conclusion must be that this question of curtailing the volume of the judicial re ports is one which overwhelms the profes sion. They cannot abolish the rule of stare deeisis; and the decisions of courts of ap peal which are not officially reported have the same force as judicial precedents as those which are officially reported. They cannot assent to the proposition that their judges are to decide their cases without giving reasons for their decisions; no law yer would wish it, and the public would not submit to it; and they cannot prevent the publication of those decisions by private persons. What, then, is to be done about
