The Progress of the Law the Indiana Bar Association, that in former generations, the lawyer had Chitty, Blackstone, Kent and the stat utes of Indiana, and that if he had a
question to solve, he would go out into the woods and think it over, and that the
result was that they had good lawyers and good judges. Now, he says, the law yer hunts up the authorities and finds twenty-five on one side and twenty-six on the other, some of greater and some of lesser authority, and he tries to balance them as best he may. The result was,
he said, that we had poorer lawyers and poorer judges, and a great deal harder work in finding out what the law was. And he added that there was no nation
in Europe, outside of Russia and the Balkan Peninsula, where the criminal laws were as ineffective as those of the
United States. If we encounter these conditions in this generation, what must it be in those that are to come after us? Whatever remedies may be suggested,
this overwhelming accumulation of case law must necessarily have a profound effect upon the doctrine of judicial pre cedent, which has ever been the distin
guishing feature in the development of American jurisprudence. We have been told that the judicial precedent is the life and soul of our law. Tennyson char
acterizes it as "The lawless science of the law, and the codeless myriad of prece
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however, a process of tacit and quasi codification going on in a manner consist ent with the character of our people and with our institutions. Thus there is a tacit codification in the contributions of
our treatises and cyclopedias to the state ment of the written law. There is also a statutory codification pro tanto going on, not only in the different states of this country, but also in England and her self governing colonies. Thus the American
Bar Association, with
the co-opera
tion of the commission for the promo
tion of uniformity in legislation in the United States, have done notable ser vice in proposing drafts of laws which have been enacted in many of the states, such as the Negotiable Instruments Act, the Divorce Act, the Stock Transfer Act and the Act concerning Wills executed
outside the state of the testator's resi dence; and these different acts have been
adopted in many of the states of the Union. These measures, however, must
in the nature of things be paliative only. However clearly the great guiding prin
ciples of the law may be determined, the infinite complexity of human trans actions will ever call for new applica tions of these controlling principles. The only effective remedy lies in the limita tion of the writing of formal written opinions to those cases which are pre sumably important as precedents. I am aware that this may shock some pro
fessional prejudices; yet it must be a matter of common knowledge that our Some tell us that codification is the printed volumes of reports are crowded only remedy. But there is a practical with opinions which can be of no con difiiculty which really makes such a ceivable value for the decision of future dent, and the wilderness of single in
stances.
suggestion academic rather than practical. We have no central government
authority, such as was exercised by Jus tinian and Napoleon, to summon the
great jurists of the country to the task of reducing our written law to a code which shall have official sanction. We have,
controversies.
In a recent visit to the state of Ten nesee as a guest of the Bar Association of that state, I was informed that the Supreme Court of that state was up with
its docket.
That was of such interest
to me, coming from a state which had
