The Green Bag
370 as an entirety, as it should be.
Then the
Edward Thompson Company followed suit and are now offering the law as an entirety in fifty-five volumes. In view of these irrefragable facts, you should not treat me too harshly for an imagined slighting of substantive law. If, however, on consideration you still think the "substantive" law has been slighted, I will thank you to reply to this letter, setting out some, or any, fundamental principles of “substantive" law which have been omitted from my work. If you can do this, your criticism is well-founded. Otherwise I know that,
in
justice to
me,
you will candidly
admit your mistake.
Whatever may be said about the points I have just mentioned, you certainly do the work an injustice in saying that "the typo graphy of all‘four volumes is of a cheapness unworthy of the text." As a matter of fact, the electro plates, paper, and binding in the
work are more expensive and finer than those in any practical law book on the market today. Let the book be compared with Bouvier's Law Dictionary or with any other high-grade work. An examination will show that the impressions from the electro plates cannot be surpassed. I will thank you to give your candid con sideration to these matters.
W. T. HUGHES. St. Louis, Mo., May 9, 1910.
The question of the precise historical rela tion of the common law to the Roman law is by no means a settled question. Each year the researches of eminent scholars are shed ding new light upon it, nor do we discount the value of some of Mr. Hughes’s own labors in this field; but it will be long before it will be possible to construct the complete story of the origin and growth of Anglo-Saxon
jurisprudence.
Much, however. as the dis
coveries of such investigators as Vinogradoff, Seebohm, and Coote may clash, at certain points, with the traditional view of the indigenous origin of the common law, we do not anticipate any truly startling new dis coveries as the outcome of the studies of this school. At all events, the time has not arrived when an author can argue, from the latest results of historical scholarship, that
the common law is based solely on Roman jurisprudence. (He certainly cannot argue it from the authority of Kent and Story.) And even if that point in historical research is ever to be reached, which we very much doubt, it is still a long way ofi. We pass now to another matter, that of the much greater attention devoted by Mr. Hughes in his treatise to rules of procedure than to substantive law. Our criticism was not that he had treated of the substantive and the adjective law in the same place. under the same headings, but that a dis proportionate amount of space had been allotted to the latter. If the two subjects be, as he contends, "indivisible," we are at a
[A reviewer’s opinions must stand or fall in accordance with their obvious fairness or unfairness, and it is not necessary for him to enter into debate concerning questions which much space would be required to discuss adequately. It is even the less neces sary, when the views advanced in the publi cation reviewed are at variance with generally accepted doctrine and the burden of proof rests on the author to sustain the propositions advanced, rather than on the reviewer to
demolish them.
loss to see how, when a writer gives such emphasis to forms and methods of procedure as to make it appear that his treatise "a concerned with them chiefly and primarily, he cannot himself be accused of subdividing the law and of subordinating the substantive to the procedural. If the substantive law is there, and is merely hidden behind a film of procedural rules without really being subordinated, then it can be discovered only by a much more penetrating scrutiny than the majority of readers will be found to possess. THE EDITOR]
