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The Green Bag
one of the signers of the Declaration of In dependence and also a justice of the Supreme 'Court of the United States, himself began the “Herculean task," and actually assem bled 1702 statutes. . . . During the years that have passed since Wilson's day our case-law has multiplied and our statute law has increased to such an extent that in 1910 a former president of the American Bar Association, the Hon. Frederick W. Lehmann, of St. Louis, is constrained to describe the situation as follows :— “If an American wishes to know the laws of his country he must turn to several hundred volumes of statutes, several thousand volumes of reports of adjudicated cases and almost as many more volumes of text-books, commenting upon and ex pounding the statutes and the cases but the rule by which he is to be governed in any transac tion is somewhere in that confused mass of legal lore, and it is so plain and so simple that it is his own fault if he does not find it or does not understand when he has found it."
Of other testimonies to the imperative need of such a work as that proposed, the Green Bag furnishes a-plenty. We can cite only a few. Gen. Thomas H. Hubbard, of New York, says :— “Statutes are enacted by thousands each year in the federal and state legislatures. Judicial deci sions do and must increase with bewildering rapid ity. while courts . must attempt to reconcile all these. Lawyers, courts, Legislatures, and the public are burdened with the effort to find what is the law and to apply it."
One of the ablest justices of the Supreme Court of the United States asserts : "Every additional day of judicial duty brings to me a deeper conviction of the absolute necessity of some system of orderly and scientific classification of the great mass of confused precedents."
The Outlook: SIMPLIFY THE LAW Law is, or ought to be, the application of common-sense principles to the deter mination of the material rights and duties of men in the varied relationships of modern life. The principles are comparatively few and simple; the applications are endless‘ and complicated. . . . To determine what are the rights of the person, of the family, of property, and of reputation, how far society will go in pro
tecting these rights, and how far it will protect them by criminal proceedings and how far leave them to be protected by private suits at law, involves endless ques tions, and in solving these questions the courts of the Anglo-Saxon people have been engaged ever since they have had courts. An immense mass of these decisiom has been accumulating in England since the organization of the King's Bench in the fourteenth century. In this country there are independent courts in forty-six states, besides federal district and circuit courts, and a Supreme Court of the United States. To know what law is and has been as decided by these courts would require a knowledge of all their decisions, an evidently impossible knowledge. Some work which should embody in a well organized and analyzed system, and in a measurably compact form, a comprehensive statement of these legal principles and their application as already determined by com petent authority, has long been regarded by the more eminent jurists as something greatly to be desired. It is desirable, not only for the profession, but even more so for the laity. Properly edited, and under such aus pices and in such fashion as to command the confidence of the courts,
Judge Dillon frankly declares :— "This colossal body of case-law is wholly unorgan ized and even unarranged. The infinite details of this mountainous mass in its existing shapc.—bear me witness, ye who hear me,—no in dustry can master and no memory retain."
and
become by
its own intellectual and moral value a quasi authority, it would both simplify and reduce litigation. It should not be enacted into law by legislation, for this would be to transfer it into a code, and experience has proved that codes tend ratherto multiply than to diminish judicial decisions, since the courts are not
It must not be forgotten that, as hinted
above, this matter is just as vital to the pub lic as to the lawyers; for, so long as the latter admit their inability to determine what the law really is, litigation is- bound to be needlessly expensive and delays unavoidable.
guided by them but are governed by them, and therefore must give them authoritative inter pretation. . . . It ought not to be published for private profit, because to carry moral authority it should be free from the taint of commercialism. It should be an endowed
