m -~'-_ Ina-1*- um
Memorandum in re Corpus juris Some day, perhaps, we shall produce a corpus iuris, which shall reduce this legal wilderness to order."
Concerning the digests, Hon. Law rence Maxwell of Cincinnati, Solicitor General under President Cleveland, reach ing the same conclusion expressed by
James Wilson a century ago, sarcastically asks: — "What sort of a. science is it that relies for its classification upon a digest of titles ar ranged alphabetically, according to the whim
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elaboration used in classifying these head notes, the result must necessarily be unsatis
factory. Cyclopedias are made up to a large extent from these head notes, and the writers give much more prominence to the small points of detail which are usually represented in the particular decisions than they do to the broader principles which underlie the deci sions, but are not amplified in them. It is this broad foundation of the general rules, in accordance with which decisions are made and tested, but not usually amplified in the deci sions themselves, that ought to be expounded in some connected and logical statement of the law."
of an indexer, whose skill is often measured
by the facility with which he can use a paste pot and scissors, or distribute diflerent faced type attractively for cross-reference?"
Little wonder is it that Judge Dillon, far-sighted prophet of his time, pleads
for a great institutional treatise-an institutional digest, declaring:—
Judge Dillon also scores the encyclo paedic digests, asking: “Who shall digest
the digest?"
And asserts :—
"Many of these are not arranged on any system or principle, but empirically, under such unusual titles as appear below. . . ."
And of the thousands of volumes of reported cases and the impossibility of the practising Bar mastering them, he declares:— "This colossal body of case-law is wholly un organized and even unarranged, except so far as digests and elementary treatises may be considered as an arrangement, which, scien tifically viewed, they are not.
The infinite
details of this mountainous mass in its exist ing shape —bear me witness, ye who hear me —no industry can master and no memory re tain."
So also the man considered by many the ablest Judge west of the Mississippi asserts :— "The whole analysis and arrangement of the body of our law has fallen into commercial and incompetent hands. Head notes of cases are made by those who have no capacity to
understand the broader principles of law as sumed in the cases decided, and whatever the
“What is needed is the constructive genius and practical wisdom that can take these truly rich, invaluable, native but scattered mate rials, . . . and out of all these build an Edifice of Law, primarily designed and adapted to daily use, which shall be at once symmetrical, harmonious, simple and commodious."
Do not these citations of authority demonstrate
the
proposition
that
a
great institutional digest, an expository digest, dealing with our law and the minutiae of its various ramifications, a complete logically co-ordinated state ment of the American Corpus juris, is
a vital necessity and that we must have it in order to prevent that ultimate chaos so rapidly approaching, to which reference has been made?
Is not the great practical question simply this: How can the desired result be produced? Americans have talked about it and dreamed about it now for more than a hundred years, but no one has “made the thing happen." We
have been, as Wilson put it, “fruitful of words, but barren of works." Can it be done? That is the issue and there can be but one answer: It has got to be done.
