The Green Bag

60

THE IMPERATIVE DEMAND BY THE PROFESSION R. CARTER has by no means stood alone among the great leaders of

the profession in insistence upon the vital need of such a work. Sir Francis Bacon declared:— “ Of the laws of England: I have commended them before for the matter, but surely they ask much amendment for the form; which

to reduce and perfect, I hold to be one of the greatest dowries that can be conferred upon this kingdom."

Again, some eighty years ago the im mortal Nathan Dane, chairman of the

committee of the Continental Congress, reporting the Ordinance of 1787 for the

government of the Northwest Territory, but re-echoed Lord Bacon, in 1823, asserting:—— “We have in the common and federal law the materials for uniformity. We have a national judiciary promoting uniformity. We only want a general efficient plan supported with energy and national feeling."

the original bench of the Supreme Court of the United States,—not satisfied with these and other achievements, monu mental and important as they were,

and (to quote Mr. Justice Moody) “with the keen vision of a seer" foreseeing

future chaos in our judicial system if a remedy were not applied, projected the great work of which Carter, Dillon and

others later urged the importance.

In

deed, Wilson himself commenced the “Herculean task," which unfortunately he did not live to complete, but the vital need of which has been voiced in the most earnest language by the great est of our jurists in the century which has intervened. This project, which’ has now staggered the profession for more than one hundred years, was (to quote Wilson's own words), "To form the mass

of our laws into a body compacted and well-proportione ." After he had been engaged upon the

He also declared :— undertaking for a year or two, he made "A serious evil we are fast running into in

is, by degrees to make our laws more uni

a preliminary report upon the status of the work, in which, after detailing some of his activities in arranging the mate rial, he called attention to the fact that he had assembled one thousand, seven

form." . . .

hundred and two statutes, and said :—

most of our states, this inundation of books

made in difierent states and nations, will increase until we can shake off more of our local notions. Our true course is plain; that

Three decades earlier James Wilson,

"Their titles I have entered into a book,

now deemed by so many to be, from the

in the order, usually chronological, in which

standpoint of things achieved, facile

they are recorded. On some of them, espe cially those of an early date, I have made and minutcd remarks; and have left ample room for more, in the course of my further investi gations. I have also reduced their several subjects into an alphabetical order by enter ing them regularly in a commonplace book." [NOTE: Wilson was unalterably opposed to an alphabetical arrangement for the work itself—see infra] " This process required time, and care, and a degree of minute

princeps

among

America's

greatest

statesmen-jurists, not satisfied with his inestimable services to the nation in the matter of the Declaration of Indepen dence and at other critical periods during the stirring times of the Continental Congress, and still later in the great Constitutional Convention, and again on