The Green Bag
96 [Sir Frederick Pollock—Continued.]
German or Continental jurist to read a paper at a meeting of the American Bar Associa
The real questions are the practical ones. Can you get an adequate number of leading American lawyers to agree on a systematic arrangement which shall be rational and also not too far removed from the familiar lines of practice? I do not see why not. I have myself tried to sketch out such a conspectus in the General Introduction to the Encyclo
psdia of the Laws of England, 2d ed., 1906; and I do not doubt that other arrangements at least as good could be made. Then, having settled the outlines of your body of law, can you get them filled in by men whose standing in the profession is such that their exposition will command general confidence? If not, the result will be only a systematized body of references to the more or less conflicting jurisprudence of the Federal Courts and of states or groups of states better planned, may be, than existing digests, but of no more authority. . . . I know no particular reason against a satisfactory solution, but obviously it is a question to be solved in the United States and not elsewhere. The last remark is still more manifestly applicable to the financial aspect of the matter. I will only say that the extensive publication over which Lord Halsbury pre sides (and which is frankly content with alphabetical order) is being issued by private enterprise, I presume with the expectation of profitable return. As to one thing I feel rather doubtful. Is it intended to deal exclusively with the Com mon Law as administered in the United States?
If so, is there not danger of exag
gerating the differences between its inter pretation in the United States and in other English-speaking jurisdictions? Are you not going even to disclose such facts as that in this country we cross our cheques and protect ancient lights and do not regard injunctions as a normal aid to criminal law? This, however, may be a merely speculative apprehension. Still, you will work for pos terity, and Canada and Australia will have
made considerable additions to the Common Law, as well as England, before our children are old.
Hon. Karl Von Lewinski, a Berlin jurist on leave of absence from the Bench by the German Government to prosecute legal research, in America. judge von Lewinski was the first
tion:— You can hardly imagine how much a matter of regret it is to me that your plan has not been carried out long ago,—I cer tainly can certify that I have suffered greatly from the lack of such a work. Sent over to your country to investigate some topics of your law, especially important for the growing relations between our nations, I had to undertake first to acquire a general knowledge of the elements of your legal system, of your principles and your theories. The result was that very soon I found my self lost between hundreds and thousands of unsystematized decisions without any possibility of systematizing them myself, because there was and there is up to the present day no system to the American law, and certainly no philosophical and logically co-ordinated treatment of it as a whole. The existing encyclopedias are by no means apt to fill the crevice, neither your text-books. which generally treat their special subjects as separate ones without regard to their places in a logical system. The knowledge of the general principles of your law, which I had expected to acquire in a few weeks, has cost me months, and is still very incomplete.
I have been forced to read numbers of per fectly unnecessary cases, spread all over the reports and quoted in digests and encyclo peedias very often in a misleading way. I have found it necessary to study a great number of text-books, covering ever so little ground just to build a fundamental basis out of these small and numerous stones, before I could really begin on my special subjects. The American Corpus juris would have saved me all this work and time. It is clear enough that, under the present circumstances, your law must seem a desert without an oasis to the foreign jurist, who has not the time to devote months to the study of elementary principles. The impression which he necessarily receives whenever he comes in touch with it is that of an impene trable chaos. This is the more a matter of regret to me, the better I come to know the wonderful wisdom of your jurists stored in those now almost unapproachable masses of cases. These hidden treasures are too valua ble to be the exclusive property of a few Ameri can lawyers. The mines should be opened also to the English and to the European Conti
