464
The Green Bag
I recommend that the Executive Com mittee consider whether or not it would be within the purview of the Conference and expedient to examine the subject with a view to the preparation of a uniform law by the proper committee. Computation of Time Suggestion has also been made to have drafted a uniform law as to computa tion of time. There is no uniform rule at present among the various states. It has been suggested that In computing the time for giving notice or doing any act, the day of serving the notice, if served personally, or the day that it is first pub lished, if published in a newspaper, shall be counted. For example, a three days' notice served on May first will be good for any purpose at any time on May fourth after the usual morn ing business hour. However, when the last day of such time falls on Sunday or a legal holiday, such Sunday or legal holiday shall not be con sidered; but the following day shall be consid ered instead of such Sunday or legal holiday.28
This also is a subject that I recommend for the consideration of the Executive Committee. Expert Draftsmen Where acts of major importance and of considerable length have been pre pared by the Conference, in a majority of cases the work has been entrusted by the committees in the first instance to an expert draftsman. I recommend to all committees hereafter the advisa bility of following this precedent. It has an undoubted tendency to hasten the completion of the work and presents other advantages that are of equal or greater moment. Of course, the expense must be provided for by the Conference. Social and Political Conditions In one of a series of articles by Roscoe "See 38 Cyc. 317; Ward v. Walters. 63 Wis., 39, 43; Pitlelkow v. Milwaukee, 94 Wis. 66 1; Minard v. Burtis, 83 Wis. 267. In re Babcock's Will. 133 N. Y. S. 655.
Pound,27 he deals with the various schools of thought on the nature of law and of the point of view from which the science of law should be approached. He divides these groups into the Philo sophical, the Historical, and the Analyti cal. He says that in the United States the basis of all deduction is the classical com mon law, the English decisions and authorities of the seventeenth, eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. . . . Thus the leading conceptions of our traditional case law come to be regarded as fundamental conceptions of legal science, and not merely the jurist, but the legis lator, the sociologist, the criminologist, the labor leader, and even as in the case of our corpora tion law, the business man must reckon with them. In consequence, when the Commis sioners on Uniform State Laws, in drafting a uniform commercial law, propose changes of existing rules incidentally, we are told they are "codifying in the air and will probably do more harm than good to commerce and mercantile law."
He shows that The tendency of practising lawyers to regard the doctrines of the system in which they have been trained as parts of the legal order of nature "is reinforced by our legal training and educa tion."
He quotes: — The critical examination of the past is neces sary in order to discover the grounds upon which we rest, but the consideration of the future is none the less necessary in order to determine whither we are going. All law is truly of the present; the past is no more, except in so far as its forces operate in the present; and the future is not yet, except in so far as it is already a condition in the present; the present is, there fore, a union of the past and the future. It alone is real. There is something that is often not sufficiently recognized by the Historical School.28
The principles upon which this Con ference has proceeded, I think it fair to say, have been based upon the doc trine so well stated by the observant 37 The Scope and Purpose of Sociological Juris prudence, 24 & 25 Harvard Law Review, nos. 8, 2 & 6. "Bluntschli's Critique of Savigny.
