Good and Bad Law Reporting. it? Nothing except to let the law of nature — the law of action and reaction — take its course, and to let the evil rectify itself in its own way. The multiplication of judicial reports will, by a natural reaction, create the same condition which visited the profession in the early stages of our jurisprudence, when they had no such reports at all. The mass will be so great that no particular thing can be found in it. It will be not merely the case of searching for a needle in a hay mow, but of hunting for some particular straw in a haymow. Moreover, there will be contradictions on every subject; all this will weaken the rule of stare deeisis, and drive the lawyers and judges to the habit of relying less on what may have been decided, and of working out and deciding causes on lines of natural justice; and under that sys tem justice will be quite as certain as it is now. II. Ent1tl1ng the Case. — In giving the title of the case, the reporter should confine himself to so much as will make a name convenient for citation. He should avoid spreading out the names of all the parties, plaintiff and defendant, as the old reporters of the Supreme Court of the United States used to do. On the other hand, he should avoid an over-contraction, such as will lead to confusion between cases having the same name. He should give the name of but one party plaintiff and one party defendant, and he should eliminate the abbreviation et al., which is not used in citing cases, and which adds no element of certainty to a citation. In describing a rail road company as a party to a cause, he should avoid that unspeakable abomina tion, a long lingo of capital letters, such as "C. B. & Q. R. R. Co."; on the other hand, he should avoid the designating of a rail way company merely by the descriptive words " Railroad Company," or " Railway . Company." By going so far in the way of abbreviation, the identity of the parties is
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lost, and the object of giving the names of the parties in citations, instead of citing merely the volume and page, is defeated. For instance, there may be a thousand cases in various American judicial reports that might be described as " Smith v. Railroad Company." The leading name of the ra1l road company should at least be given, so as to make the citation, for example, " Smith v. Chicago, &c. R. Co." This makes a neat form of citation, and one sufficiently accu rate for practical purposes. III. Stat1ng the Facts of the Case. — It has often been said that a clear state ment of the facts of a case, made to a court in argument, decides the case. Certainly the power of an advocate consists largely in his ability to array before the court or jury the essential facts upon which his client's action or defense depends, dismissing all unnecessary details and casting out all irrelevancies; unless, as some dishonorable advocates do, he seeks, through subtlety and chicanery, to make use of unimportant details and irrelevancies, to confuse the real facts of a bad case, or of an insuff1cient defense before the judge or jury. It is equally true that a sound judicial opinion is nearly writ ten when the constitutive facts upon which the law pronounces its judgment have been clearly stated. This statement of the facts, whether embodied in the opinion or pre sented separately from it, should always be prepared by the court, or by the judge who writes the opinion as the mouthpiece of the court, and never by the reporter. The rea son why the reporter should never be in trusted with this duty is threefold : I. He is but one man, and he may have the office of reporting the decisions of a court com posed of from three to nine judges. He cannot attend the arguments1 and find time 1 When the late John William Wallace became re porter of the Supreme Court of the United States, he adopted the practice of attending all the sessions of the court and of listening to the arguments, regarding that as necessary to enable him to make a proper report of the
