Memorandum in re Corpus juris
67
a point where practice by precedent, to be exhaustive, has become impossible; and so the problem that confronted the Roman emperors and terminated in the Pandects of Justinian is now demanding immediate solu tion at the hands of American legislators, lawyers and jurists. . . . scarcely anything has yet been done in law, and what has been
dize and minimize the manufacture of legis lative law and judicial law. . . . "It is a work of vast importance to the United
done is so bulky, unorganized and confused, that to reduce, rationalize and systematize it is
the President for 1908-9 of the New York State Bar Association, calls attention to the fact that in December, 1907, Pro fessor Leonhard, the then Kaiser Wil
the greatest task of all."
So also the distinguished General Thomas H. Hubbard of New York
strikes the keynote when he asserts:—
States and to every state of the United States,
and to every Court in the United States and all its states."
So also Hon. Francis Lynde Stetson,
helm lecturer in Columbia University, stated that in his opinion such a work
is “the vital need of American law." “Statutes are enacted by thousands each year in the federal and state legislatures. Judicial decisions do and must increase with bewildering rapidity, while Courts are com pelled to deal with multiplying statutes and the multiplying decisions of contemporaneous Courts and the bulk of the earlier decisions which go to make up the common law, and must attempt to reconcile all these. Text-books treat separate topics with little regard to their symmetrical relation to other topics that make up the entire body of the law. Lawyers, Courts, legislatures and the public are burdened with the efiort to find what is the law, and to apply it. It must be hunted through thickets of session laws and reports and digests and compilations and text-books."
And Mr. Stetson, speaking for him self, declares :-— "As heretofore I have assured you, I share your conviction as to ‘the vital importance and necessity of the production of a logical and philosophical statement of all our law.’ "This necessity presses most urgently per haps upon our American Bar, facing an over whclming output of unassimilated opinions from thousands of judges, as well as the frag~ mentary comments of hundreds of text writers, who, with a. few fortunate exceptions, produce commercial treatises under the pressure of commercial need and at the behest of commercial publishers, whose commercial instinct in this particular prescribes the limits for both the profession and the general public."
Again he declares :— He also asserts :— "To lessen or remove the burden that now exists, and to prevent that burden from being again imposed, would confer upon the country benefits that can hardly be overestimated. Words can not exaggerate the importance of such a work."
He further says :— "It should collect and collate the principles that are now scattered through reports, and should reduce them to formulas so definite and precise that Courts would not go behind the formulas to the cases from which they are deduced. This would eliminate a mass of judicial decisions, in the sense that it would reduce themtotheir proper value. . . . “It should also present a framework upon which the laws of legislatures and of Courts might, in future, be fitted, and it would metho
"But the importance of a logical and philo sophical statement of all our law affecting the possessions and the person of every sojourner in the United Staes, is vital to the public as much as to the legal profession, which constitutes a part, and only a small part, of the public dependent upon it for learned and accurate
advice.
Quite recently it was observed by
one of the best-known bankers of the world that "the greatest risk in business is the legal risk." The reduction to a minimum of busi ness risks is the mark of business intelligence."
And again : "No reflecting business man can be indifi‘er ent to any project promising to diminish the greatest of his business risks,law's uncertainty,
and to supply for the instruction and pro tection of business men, both independently
