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The Green Bag
and through their legal advisers, an accessible authoritative and adequate statement of the whole law of our land. “No such work now exists."
Mr. Stetson sums up with these force ful words :— "Though the practice of law is an art, the law itself is a science, and its final statement must be scientific in process and result. Other wise, both those who follow it as a vocation
and the general public, subject to its control, at critical moments encounter the destructive unforeseeable and inexorable results of govern ment according to the haphazard aggregation of the unrelated expressions of judges and writers. "Some plan such as you ofier must without great delay be adopted and be consummated, or the profession and the country alike will be lost in the increasing and bewildering maze: of legal pronouncements. "Your plan certainly is ideal, . . . it is in conceivable that any department of research can involve such beneficial consequences as would the collection, the revision and the statement in logical and philosophical order of the whole body of the laws governing the rights of persons and property."
And it is well for those who love their profession to mark well this recent utter ance of one of the ablest Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States : "Every additional day of judicial duty brings to me a deeper conviction of the abso lute necessity of some system of orderly and scientific classification of the great mass of con fused precedents, so that they may become useful in developing rules which would be consistent and harmonious."
Some there are who blindly close their eyes to the need of a great co-ordinated statement of the American system of jurisprudence, exemplifying in adequate perspective everybranch and department of the law, and suggest that we have
particular treatises on particular sub
scathingiindictment of the condition of our written jurisprudence than is con tained in a letter recently received from one of the ablest teachers of law in America, the dean now for nearly a decade of a law-school conceded by the profession to be one of the best (Dean Kirchwey of Columbia). He says :— "I have in mind gone over the various subjects of the law and have been appalled at the meagerness of the result. What is there on Real Property, for example, excepting Rawle on Covenants and Gray on Perpetuities and on Alienation? Go over the whole field and you will find an abundance of so-called treolises of an encyclopedic character, digests mas querading as text-books, manuals and ‘Horn books,’ which state the more obvious rules of the law with a fair degree of accuracy, but where, with the exception of Evidence, will you find a single topic in the law treated with even a fair degree of thoroughness and philosophical spirit!"
So also, James Barr Ames,* the bril liant and long-time Dean of the Harvard Law School, emphasizes the same view, declaring: “Some of our law books would rank with the best in any country, but as a class our treatises are distinctly poor."
And SirMontague Crackenthorpe, when visiting this country in 1896 with Lord Chief Justice Russell of England, touched
this subject forcefully in his address before the American Bar Association, when he said :— "We have in our libraries a number of monographs, dealing with the subheads of law in minute detail~—books on torts, on con tracts, on settlements and wills, on sales, etc.
We have also many valuable compendia, dealing with the law as a whole. Each and all of these bear witness to the disjointed character of our jurisprudence. The numerous mono graphs overlap and jostle each other, like rudderless boats tossing at random on the surface of a windswept lake. The institu
jects which are all suflicient in them
tional treatises, in their endeavor to be ex
selves. Fortunately this is only the superficial view. I know of no more
haustive fail in point of logical arrangement.
- See p. 72, wire.
