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The Green Bag

judges in England since the days of William the Norman. To merely take

up a volume of reports and to see that Mr. Justice Ashhurst said sooand-so, and Mr. Justice Buller said so-and-so, and Mr. Justice Patteson said another thing, is a matter of very little real consequence to us unless we have some sort of knowledge of the true value of

and was followed by the beheading of a king; and the other involved the founda tions of a great branch of equity juris

prudence.

When Charles the First was

engaged in his unhappy differences with his Parliament be relied on a learned

Attorney-General, Sir William Noy, for guidance, who, in drawing on his recon

dite knowledge of the law, attempted

that man's work in his position as a judge. In this age when we are over burdened with the multitude of deci

prerogative by certain old cases which

sions, and where frequently the active

ports.

practitioner is looking out not for the strong judgment but simply for the last

knowledge, historically, to be able to

ruling on the case, it must be of infinite

assistance to counsel, in discussing intel ligently and scientifically before the court of last resort, where they wish to

weed out what happens to be ephemeral, or extraneous, or irrelevant, or merely of temporary importance, from those

golden strands which alone should enter into the imperishable fabric of juris prudence, to have a clue to a knowledge

of the man and to the value of his work.

This is a laborious task, but it

is a most absorbing and most fascinating one. Cases themselves, unless properly understood as to their history, are some times misleading. I recollect being very much impressed, some years ago, by looking into that extraordinary book,

to justify the King's exercise of his he had found in some antiquated re

He either lacked the requisite

properly

appraise

the

circumstances

under which those decisions were given, or else he lacked courage to be frank

with his Sovereign and tell him that they were dangerous precedents to fol low, but he threw his weight in that national struggle upon those precedents

against the rising powers of the people. The result was that Charles the First lost his throne. He was beheaded through the ignorance or weakness of his Attorney-General in misreading prece

dents. The other instanoe was a case reported in the 4th Wheaton, where even so high an authority as Chief Jus tice Marshall-and his opinion was concurred in by Mr. Justice Story—

so far as its scholarship is concerned, known as “The Reporters," by John William Wallace, Reporter of the Su

went so far as to subvert the founda tions of equity jurisprudence with re gard to a trust in favor of a charity where the object of the charity was vague and indefinite. The poison crept into

preme Court of the United States, in which, when he was the librarian of our Law Association of Philadelphia, he

the veins of your sister state of Connecti cut. It has even, in recent times, affected the jurisprudence of our distant sister

dealt with most of the old common law reporters and old equity reporters from Atkyns down to Ventris and Vesey. He

state of Oregon.

attempted to give a systematic and illus

when

trative description of the character and

Girard, attempted to establish a charity

the value of the reporter, and there

which at the present time sparkles like a jewel on the brow of the adopted city of the French merchant, and Daniel

dwelt on two striking instances.

One

of the cases involved the fate of a throne

It did not attack you

here, nor did it attack Massachusetts,

but it did assail us in Pennsylvania, the

great

merchant,

Stephen