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The Green Bag

fail were its rules made rigidly operative upon future cases;—~it could proudly dispense with any legislative sanction."

English publication, The journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation, to wit:—

Of the importance of such a work, Mr.

“In these days, when signs are not wanting that England is beginning to occupy herself for practical ends with the methods of other nations, it may perhaps be not inappropriate to call to mind that she still stands alone in having done next to nothing towards bringing under one roof the vast multitude of scattered fragments of her law and moulding the amor phous conglomeration of its rules and prin ciples into something which could go by the name of a scientific system. Instead of that, she goes on endlessly piling Pelions upon

justice Holmes has said:— "The importance, if it could be obtained cannot be overrated."

And within a few weeks, another Justice of the Supreme Court of the

United States (Mr. Justice Brewer) has emphasized “the great blessing to the profession it would be to have such a work.” And so have many other of the great leaders of our profession during more than a century. But no one has arisen and accom plished the task, or indeed undertaken

it under any systematic plan which would seem to insure a complete state

Ossas of decisions and statutes, with that most

grotesque (though indispensable) fiction writ large over all, that ‘Everybody is presumed to know-the law.’"

The 1909 President of the American Bar Association, Hon. Frederick W. Lehmann of St. Louis, within the present

ment of our law embodying the best that

year has emphasized the situation as

the profession can produce. Yet our case-law multiplies and our statute law

follows :——

increases with such bewildering rapidity that none who reason can doubt that eventually but one thing, Judge Dillon's suggested “ Edifice of Law, primarily designed and adapted to daily use,"

can prevent ultimate chaos-that chaos which is already “casting its shadow before,” ever year by year making more difficult the work of both Bench and Bar. In England a similar condition exists though by no means as acute, for of course there there are not forty-six distinct state jurisdictions constantly flooding

the profession and the public with new laws and new judicial decisions, in ad dition to those from the national legis lature and Courts, 9. large percentage of which as precedents are “ deathless-yet

valueless." AJustice of ournational Supreme Court has just directed my attention to the following from the pen of Julius Hirsch feld in the April, 1909, number of the

"If an American wishes to know the laws of his country he must turn to several hun dred volumes of statutes, several thousand volumes of reports of adjudicated cases and almost as many more volumes of text-books,

commenting upon and expounding the statutes and the cases, . . . but the rule by which he is to be governed in any transaction is somewhere in that confused mass of legal lore, and it is so plain and so simple that it is his own fault if he does not find it or does not undersand when he has found it."

And again he says :— “ The litigant, untrained in the law and unused to its mysteries, must bear the burden of the blunders of the Court and counsel, grievous as these may be." Senator Beveridge has the

happy

faculty of summing up a situation in picturesque and effective language. Con cerning conditions in America he most truly says :— "The multiplication of decisions has reached