NEW LAW BOOKS.
// is the intention of The Green Bag to have its book reviews written by competent reviewers. The usual custom of magazines is to confine book notices to books sent in for review. At the request of subscribers, however, The Green Bag will be glad to review or notice any recently published law book, whether re ceivedfor review or not.
THE MESSAGES AND PROCLAMATIONS OF THE GOVERNORS OF IOWA. Compiled and edited by B. F. Shambaugh, Professor of Political Science in the University of Iowa. Iowa City; State Historical Society of Iowa. 1903. Vols. I-IV. (pp. xi +487, xiii 4-524, x-f472, ix+382.) These are the first four of a series of eight volumes. The undertaking is in mam respects vast, for it requires the discovery of official documents both in official records and also in newspapers and other places not readily discoverable, and further, it requires the collection of biographical details as to many persons whose prominence has long since disappeared. There are parts of the United States where diaries, voluminous cor respondence, autobiographies, and similar manuscript records supply a basis, not free from suspicion, to be sure, for the writer oí history; but Iowa has been the home of peo ple who are not given to self-consciousness, and hence the task of the editor in search of biographical matter must have been labor ious, and hence too his biographical intro ductions are of unusual value. For the same reason, the messages and proclamations themselves are peculiarly important pictures of life and of opinion. To a lawyer, the value of the volumes lies in the indirect evidence of the mode in which the Anglo-American system of law Ins passed from the older to the newer parts of the United States. As Iowa was part of the great Louisiana purchase from France, before the purchase it was subject to French and Spanish law. Iowa was but sparsely settled in those times, no doubt; but there was at least one Iowa case then tried at St. Louis, and the law used in this case was the
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Civil Law. How does it happen that the Civil Law is not, as in Louisiana, the basis of the legal system to this day? These volumes do not attempt to answer this question, but they answer it well, nevertheless. Law is the product of the people, of course; and the sketches of the early gover nors show where the people came from: Dodge, first governor of the original Terri tory of Wisconsin of which Iowa formed a part, was from Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, and Michigan; Lucas, the first gov ernor of the Territory of Iowa, was from Virginia and Ohio; Chambers, its next gov ernor, was from New Jersey and Kentucky; Clark, the next, was from Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Wisconsin; Briggs, the first governor of the State of Iowa, was from Ver mont and Ohio; and Hempstead, the next, was from Connecticut, Missouri, and Illinois. It is not necessary to go farther in order to indicate from what environment the early influential inhabitants of Iowa brought their conceptions of law. Yet it is well worth while to stop a moment among the old docu ments and to notice what were the ideas thus brought at an early day into a State now among the most prominent. It will not be possible or necessary to go beyond a few extracts from the first annual message of Robert Lucas, the first governor of the Ter ritory of Iowa, who in Ohio had been a jus tice of the peace, a member of each house of the Legislature, and governor. The message is dated November 12, 1838, and among the passages which are striking either because of the date or for some other reason, are these: "In laying the foundation of a system of jurisprudence in the Territory, would it not be advisable to unite our exertions in sim plifying not only our laws, but the rules of practice and proceedings in the various courts of justice within the Territory, and to exclude therefrom, as much as practicable, everything of a fictitious or ambiguous char acter? In my opinion, the proceedings in our courts of justice should be concise, void of technical fiction, and always directed to
