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The Green Bag
school work, except that it would be ad
visable for a majority of them to secure
"It is this broad foundation of the general rules in accordance with which decisions are
made and tested, but not usually amplified in a leave of absence for at least one year of the period during which they will be engaged upon their part of the work, and in order that they may be attached during that year at the headquarters
office of the publication, doing their work there during that time. Apart from this, however, we would expect a consultation conference of the entire
editorial force to be held once amonth of at least a full day in length. It is the judgment of Dean Kirchwey and others—speaking from the standpoint
the decisions themselves, that ought to be expounded in some connected and logical statement of the law. Such a statement can not be made by individual text writers, and it ought to be made by those who through experi ence in teaching have been driven to deduce principles from practical application. The fact is that the only really intelligent notes of current cases and comments thereon are found in the law school journals which are not published as financial enterprises but as the result of the labor of those connected with the schools."
So also James Barr Ames”i declares :—
of the ablest law-professors——that such an expert Board to be composed of the very best law-teachers in the profession
can readily be secured to work out this plan if convinced that the co-ordinated
product of all will represent the best effort of the profession; indeed that under
these circumstances all invited would
view it as a great opportunity and that, if the financial reward were sufficient,
their services could undoubtedly be de pended upon.
The importance of having the ablest experts in the law-school element in the profession prominently represented in the editorial work, which is necessary
in the production of a logically co-ordi nated statement of the American Corpus juris, has also been emphasized by that distinguished jurist of the Western States—-Mr. Chief Justice McClain of the Supreme Court of Iowa, who says of our plan: “It is a great project, and as it seems to me feasible." Then, after referring to the fact that the writers in
the encyclopaedias on law give “ much more prominence to the small points of detail which are not usually represented
in the particular decisions than they do to the broader principles which underlie the decisions, but are not amplified in them," he declares :—
“We live in the era of specialization, and the time has now come for the intensive cultivation of the field of law. The enormous increase in the variety and complexity of human rela tions, the multiplication of law reports. and the modern spirit of historical research, de mand for the making of a first-class book on a single branch of the law, an amount of time and
thought that a Judge or lawyer in active prac tice can almost never give. The professor, on the other hand, while dealing with his subject in the lecture room, is working in the direct line of his intended book."
And writing specifically concerning the present project, Dean Ames says :— "The bulk of the work will have to be done, as the lion's share of preparing the German Civil Code was done, by the professors."
It is believed that writers on particular parts of the law, under our plan, would '
readily understand the necessity for their individual work being executed in such manner as to accord with the sys tem determined upon, and that by ‘We record with deep sorrow the passing on beyond on January 8. 1910, of that luminous star in the firmament of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence— arnes Barr Ames. His death will prove a greater
as to the legal world, present and future, than perha s that of any other one man who could be name; and to those who in this project had hoped for his continued advice and counsel, the loss LS irreparable. (See p. 104 infra.)
