The Green Bag

348

pendence. There were more copies of Blackstone's Commentaries sold in the thirteen colonies than there were in London. The first American edition of Blackstone's Commentaries was pub

lished in Philadelphia just five years after the appearance of the first edition in London.

in 1772 twenty-five hun

dred American lawyers subscribed for that book and at the very head of the

list of subscribers stands the name of John Adams of Massachusetts. English common law had a new birth on this

continent owing to that very circum stance, and therefore it is that whether in crowded cities, on the plains, in val leys, among the mountains, or on the

shores of our Great Lakes, and along

raising of the questions in Cohen: v. Vir gim'a, Gibbons v. Ogden and McCullough v. Maryland.

They were in embryo

awaiting the decision of that great mind which was to move like Newton's, or ment Keppler's, of principles or Copernicus‘, which in should the settle guide

our legal astronomy and dominate our legal heavens forever. We take the statutes.

have a biography.

Statutes, too,

They are not dead

things. They are the will of the people crystallized into law. Do we not ask ourselves the question: How was it that in such a degraded and degenerate age

as that of Charles the Second a statute such as that against Frauds and Per juries should happen to be passed? ls

the banks of our mighty rivers the great

it enough simply to say that the 17th

commentator for years was omnipresent.

clause is enforced in most of the states of the Union? We require to know something about the history of those times and why it was that those various sections had to be put in the form of some statutory expression of the will of the English Parliament in order to guide

Now

to this may

be added

the

thought that it is not alone to the lives of our judges, or to the lives of our commentators and our great authors that we must turn, to properly appre

ciate the full value of this as an aid to the mastery of the various and ill sorted learning of the law, but we must take the statutes and we must take the

judges in their determination of matters and principles which lie at the founda

cases.

illustration.

Cases themselves must have an

ancestry. Judges cannot usurp juris diction. They cannot, however philo

sophically inclined, settle doubts, or contrive that an issue shall be evolved on the records brought to them for decision. It is one of the extraordinary things that had John Marshall gone to his grave after only fifteen years of service only one great decision of his would have appeared, the case of Mar bury v. Madison, but all the other great

tion of jurisprudence.

Take a national

Our great Judiciary Act

of 1789 can be personified in the same

way. The 25th section particularly pro vided for the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States Surely, when we read the journals of the Continental Congress and the letters that George Washington addressed to the Governors of the different states. and his correspondence with the mem bers of the Continental Congress, we find that Washington, being the focus

cases which have made his name im

upon which all the converging rays of

mortal occurred in the second half of

his career. Why? Because the country had not grown up during the earlier years of his judicial incumbency; time

dissatisfaction were centred, saw as no other man saw the necessity for a great. strong, federal, central jurisdiction which should regulate and control mat

was required for the evolution of the

ters with which the state governments