American Editorial Comment upon the Corpus Juris Project are interpreting these statutes and adding their quota of judge-made law. Besides that we have the whole body of the common law and portions of law of other origin, making the term “learned in the law" a misnomer, since
no human intellect can compass more than a small fraction of it. The Green Bag, 3. lawyers‘ magazine, gives up the greater part of its February issue to the discussion of the desirability and possibility of a Corpus jurr's, which we understand to mean a statement of the whole body of the law in scientific language in concise and sys tematic form. It would difier from a code in that it would be expository of the law rather than a literal statement of it. It should be done by experts who give their whole time to its preparation. It is estimated that twenty volumes of 1,000 pages each would suflice to bring the enormous body of American jurisprudence into something like order and unity.
Such an exposition of the law, if done so well that the courts would take its state ment of the law as authoritative, would not merely promote the convenience of lawyers and courts, but would benefit the public as well. It should make law cheaper, because more easily ascertained, and decrease litiga
tion by making the law less doubtful and the advice of counsel more uniform and better worth following. The proposition is highly praised by the greatest lawyers of the country and if carried out would be a very great public benefit. With such a work completed it might be possible for the diligent to know the law, as each one is bound to do in theory.
469
law more certain. American law, as it exists today, is not systematized. Our federal and state statutes and jurisprudence are a mass formidable in size and by no means consistent throughout. . . . For this condition of confusion, which W. B. Hornblower, ex-president of the New York
State
Bar
Association,
declares
is
"little short of appalling," the people are accustomed to thoughtlessly blame the lawyers. But the lawyers do not make the laws; they merely try to understand and interpret them; the lawyers are not the Sovereign people. Elect every member of the bar to Congress or the legislature, and exclude all others, and we'd have great changes for the better. "Codification," the late Thomas J. Semmes of New Orleans told the American Bar Association in his address as its president,
"is the natural result of the evolution of the law." It is to be remembered that in an early century of our era Justinian had the law codified, as in modern times Napoleon did. American law has never been codified. The time has come to do it. Mr. Alexander and his associates figure out that the cost will be $600,000. It must be remembered that the labor necessary would take the time of many lawyers for many months. The people are not likely to tax themselves to raise the sum necessary, so an appeal is made to some multi-millionaire to come forward and serve his country, with the reward of fame. Hartford 0ourant:-— THE AMERICAN (,‘ORI.J US jURIS
Houston (Texas) chronicle: A CODE OF AMERICAN LAW Can our legal jungle be cleared? In the Green Bag of Boston, a lawyers’ magazine, Mr. Lucien Hugh Alexander presents a scheme, worked out by himself, Dr. James DeWitt Andrews and Prof. George W. Kirchwey, which is nothing less than to call the law to order. In other words, these experts propose that the law be systematized into a comprehensive and brief whole, to have prepared an American Corpus juris. Undoubtedly this would be of enormous advantage to lawyers and laymen, to those who have to do with courts and those who wish to avoid litigation. It would make the
Lucien Hugh Alexander of the Philadelphia bar has outlined in the February number of the Green Bag a plan to make “a com plete and comprehensive statement in ade quate perspective of the entire body of American law, our Corpus Jan's." The plan is the joint product of Mr. Alexander, Pro fessor George W. Kirchwey of the law school of Columbia University, and Dr. James De Witt Andrews, long the chairman of the American Bar Association's committee on classification of the law. It is a large under taking which these lawyers propose, and Mr. Alexander makes it plain that the difi‘iculties in the_ way of its accomplishment have not been underestimated and that they are not believed to be insurmountable. . . . Of the
