The Unification of American Law By HANNIS TAYLOR T has been estimated that in the
under titles and divided into three books,
France of the tenth century there were three hundred and sixty difierent kinds or groups of customary laws. Sometimes a custom prevailed through
preceded by a preliminary title. It was the final product of the fusion of the customary laws, wholly excluding all feudal laws and customs, of royal ordi
out an entire province, at others it was
nances and laws of the Revolution, and
confined to a city or town, or to some
of the vital principles of Roman private law stated with the greatest possible clearness and brevity.
small locality. Only with the history of such precedent conditions clearly in view can we grasp the real nature of the marvelous work of codification made
possible at last by that abrupt and pro found break with the past known as the French Revolution. The necessity for such a work grew out of such a ter
rible complication of laws as had never existed in any other country, a condi tion prompting Voltaire to declare that
a traveler in France changed horses not oftener than he changed laws. The effort to work a reform through the creation of a uniform code began in the
Constituent Assembly with dreamers of the Rousseau school,who claimed that it should be “as simple as nature," so plain that any adult could understand it without extrinsic aid. But the work thus inaugurated never began in earnest
On January 1, 1900, just a century after Tronchet and his colleagues began to draft the Code Napoléon, was ofii cially promulgated a new general code
for the whole German Empire.
We
should be able to look with confidence for an outline of that code to the world
famous jurist, Dr. Rudolph Sohm, who was the leading member of the com mission that made it. From him we learn that the re-establishment of the
German Empire was necessary to the re-establishment of German law; that
that law, as embodied in the Civil Code, “is compiled principally from the vari ous provincial codes before mentioned,
and notably from those of Prussia and Saxony.” He had told us long before
that “it would be a mistake to suppose
ished in about four years, was adopted
that the framers of these codes (the Prussian Landrecht, etc.) were suddenly inspired with some new and original wisdom. The codes were of course con structed on the basis of the law as it
by'the legislature and published in 1804, with all the reports and discussions in
previously existed. Inasmuch, then, as prior to these codes (1'. 2., from the recep
the Tribunate and Council of State,
tion of Roman law in the sixteenth century down to the end of the eighteenth) the law of the Pandects had subsidiary force as law throughout the whole of Germany, these codes must, of course, have been framed more par
until
1800, when
Napoleon,
as
First
Consul, appointed Tronchet as the head of a commission which completed the draft in four months. The entire work, fin
showing the original draft and all changes
made in it. Thus out of a prolonged and critical process finally emerged the most famous modern code of substantive law, consisting of 2,281 sections, arranged
