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to perform the rest of his official work. He cannot do the work, which has been dis tributed among the judges of a numerous bench, of making the statements of the facts of all the cases which they have been able to decide. 2. If he attempts to do this, he will in many cases make statements of facts essentially different from those upon which the court predicates its judgment; in other words, he will understand the facts one way and the court will understand them another way; and this will introduce confusion and incongruity into the decisions of the court, and may often, in supposed cases, render its decisions absurd. 3. The judicially ex pounded law is always an exposition of the law as applicable to a given state of facts; it is always the deduction of the judge, called the conclusion of the law, upon a given state of facts. This being so, a judicial opinion cannot be well written unless the judge opens it with a statement of the facts upon which the judgment of the court proceeds. Now, if the reporter is in all cases to make his state ment of the facts, the result may frequently arise that the judge may make one state ment and the reporter another, — a spec tacle which would not be edifying, to say the very least. If it is said, in reply to this, that where the court, or the judge who writes the opin ion of the court, understands the facts one way, and the reporter understands them another way, the public have, in the inter ests of truth, the right to both expositions of the facts, the answer is, that the reporter is put in his office as an editor, and not as a supervisor, of the decisions of the court. The court may err in its statements of the facts, as all men err, but the reporter is not there to correct them. It may, however, be worth considering whether, in case the facts, facts of each case, and a proper condensation of the printed briefs or arguments of counsel. Whether he kept up the practice during his incumbency of the office, we do not know. Certainly his statements of the facts of the cases reported by him were models of perspicuity, though not of brevity.
as contended for by the counsel for the un successful party, differ from those stated by the court in its opinion, the reporter ought not to be permitted to state in outline the facts as understood by counsel for the party against whom the decision is rendered. IV. Report1ng the Br1efs and Argu ments of Counsel. — This leads to an other question, namely, the extent to which reporters should go, or to which they should be allowed to go, in printing the briefs or arguments of counsel. This question can not in all cases be decided by the reporter, nor even by the court. The opinions of appellate courts are generally reported and published by public authority and at public expense; and the legislature, on grounds of economy, prohibits the printing of briefs and arguments of lawyers altogether, or at most permits the printing of a condensation. If this condensation goes beyond the limit of showing clearly the positions taken by counsel and the authorities cited in support of those positions, it is of little value. But yet even this condensation is better than an entire omission. It is often necessary, to a correct understanding of the judgment of the court, to know the positions taken by counsel, and especially by the counsel of the appellant or plaintiff in error. In examining a decision for the purpose of determining its value as a precedent, the discriminating judge or lawyer will often turn to the arguments of counsel and treat them as a part of the statement of the case in judgment. It is true that, take the American bar all in all, the briefs and printed arguments filed in our appellate courts are not of a very high order as liter ary performances. They often lack clear ness and precision of thought. Authorities are often copied into them, without exami nation, from the footnotes of text-writers and digests; and sometimes they are not couched in grammatical English. But the same may often be said of judicial opinions,
