In law reform Georgia has been in advance of all her sister States. Whether or not this is a mere local boast which has been suffered to go uncontradicted because it has only been aired on domestic soil, can best be tested by throwing down the challenge on this wide arena. Georgia's claim to this particular pre-eminence rests on the Judiciary Act of 1799, and on codification, which was provided for by the Constitution of 1798, and finally adopted in 1861. Both of these facts have had a large influence in her judicial history. The Judiciary Act of 1799 provided that " all suits shall be by petition to the Superior Court," thus sweeping away all distinction between the forms of actions; of these petitions the sole requirement was that they should " plainly, fully, and distinctly " set forth the plaintiff's cause of action, thus dispensing with all purely technical averments. The Act further provided that the defendant's answer should make the issue, and abolished "special pleading." So that while the Massachusetts Court^[1] were laboriously striving to preserve a judgment from the awful slip of a "whereas" in the writ, and were teaching William Cullen Bryant^[2] that —

"In the nice sharp quillets of the law.

Good faith! he was no wiser than a daw,"

Georgia had simplified her law of pleading, and recognized the juridical truth that the substance of right is more important than the science of statement.

The second ground upon which Georgia bases her claim of priority is codification. The Constitution of 1798 contained this provision: "Within five years after the adoption of this Constitution, the body of our laws, civil and criminal, shall be revised, digested, and arranged under proper heads, and promulgated in such manner as the Legislature may direct." In a message to the General Assembly in 1827, Gov. John Forsyth said : " The authors of the Constitution obviously contemplated the revision, digest, and arrangement of the written and unwritten law of the State, and the publication of the whole in the most useful form."

The proposed work, however, was never actually begun until 1858, when the General Assembly provided for a commission "to prepare for the people of Georgia a Code which should as near as practicable embrace in a condensed form the laws of Georgia, whether derived from the Common Law, the Constitutions, the Statutes of the State, the Decisions of the Supreme Court, or the Statutes of England of force in this State." The work was completed in 1861 . The result, embracing a codification of large portions of the common law and equity, was adopted by the Legislature, its operation being postponed until 1863. There had been in other States, before this time, revisions of statutes labelled "Codes" upon their backs; but incontestably the Georgia experiment was the first real code adopted in any State. It attracted at the time (1861-1863) little attention at home, and none abroad. Inter arma silent leges. The master-mind in the codification was Thomas R. R. Cobb, whom Georgians regard the greatest lawyer of his time. He had " taken all law for his province," was profoundly versed in the civil as well as the common law, and accomplished in his short career a prodigious amount of labor. He was the second Reporter of the Supreme Court of the State; and this fact is made the

1. ↑ Coffin v. Coffin, 2 Mass. 360.
2. ↑ 2 Bloss v. Tobey, 2 Pick 320.