courts from the verdicts of juries, and con solidated into judicial rules; and we have a body of authority covering all the usual oc casions of men's business and traffic, and already tending to be, if anything, too elab orate. All this owes very little indeed to early precedents. The medieval feeling seems to have been rather that, outside a few special and stringent rules, a man should be held liable only for default in what he had positively undertaken; and, in days when mechanical arts were few and simple, and the determination of disputed facts was still a rude and uncertain process, this may have served well enough. But the law was capa ble of growing to the demands of new times and circumstances; its conclusions in detail were not dogmas-, but flexible applications of living and still expanding principles. The knowledge and resources of a reasonable man are far greater in the twentieth than in the sixteenth or the eighteenth century, and accordingly so much the more is required of him. IN the Columbia Law Reinéis for Decem ber, Sir Frederick Pollock begins a series of scholarly articles on "The Expansion of the Common Law." Concerning judicial inter pretation of the law, he says: A further development, already foreseen in the thirteenth century and settled beyond questioning in the fifteenth, is that which gives our jurisprudence its most peculiar and striking character. Judicial interpretation of the law is the only authentic interpreta tion. So fa^as the particular case is concerned this may seem an obvious matter. Positively, the court is there for the purpose of deciding, and has to arrive at a decision. Negatively, no other authority has any right to inter fere with a court of justice acting within its competence; this is perhaps not quite so ob vious, but may be supposed to be the rule in all or very nearly all civilized jurisdictions. But the Common Law goes much beyond this immediate respect for judicial authority. The judgment looks forward as well as backward. It not only ends the strife of the parties but
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lays down the law for similar cases in the fu ture. The opinion of a Superior Court em bodied in the reasons of its judgment stands, with us, on a wholly different footing from any other form of learned opinion. I am not aware that any historical reason can be given for this other than the early consoli dation of royal jurisdiction in England, and the administration of justice by the king's judges on a uniform system throughout the country. Probably we shall never know how much they simplified, or whether their meth ods were always what we should now call strictly judicial. But we know that in the time of Henry I., it was still possible to talk of distinct bodies of custom as existing in Wessex, in Mercia, and in the Dane law; that in the time of Henry II., there were still un defined verities of usage, which may or may not have been confined to precedence and to the rules of inheritance; and that in the time of Henry III., men spoke only of the laws and customs of England, and whatever did not conform to the Common Law as de clared by the king's court had to justify it self as an exception on some special ground. The king's judges, and they alone, had power to lay down what the general custom of England, in other words the Common Law, for the terms are synonymous in our books, must be taken to be. Quite possibly their own views of convenience counted for something in the process of determination; at the same time it is certain that, so far as universal or very general usage really ex isted, the king's judges, doing the king's busi ness in all parts of the country and compar ing their experience at Westminster, were the persons best qualified to know it. The law of the thirteenth century was judgemade law in a fuller and more liberal sense than the law of any succeeding century has been. THE American Law Review comments in the following vigorous way on the extension of Federal jurisdiction of State canals by the recent decision—not yet reported—of the United States Supreme Court: It has been some time since the Supreme
