270
The Green Bag
accessible is to be found in the profusion with which Diocletian and his successors had used their legislative power, flood
statutory authority corresponding with
ing the Empire with a mass of ordinances which few persons could procure or
American Encyclopaedia or Pandects of judge-made law, with no statutory
master. Certainly we now stand in a like situation. The noblest effort so far made to bring order out of the inco
auth0rity,—a compilation “the big law publishing firms” can construct with far more skill and success than any inex
herent mass is that embodied in the
perienced foundation,—but a code, a
monumental work known as the Ameri can and English Encyclopaedia of Law,
typical code of American state law, which each state can voluntarilyadopt as its own with the least change possible. Statesmen
whose value to the legal profession can hardly be estimated. In its volumes the American lawyer was permitted to look upon the result of the first serious attempt to reduce, systematize and re fine the essence of our substantive law, state and federal, carried as far per
only one of its three elements,—the
Pandects.
What we need is not a new
of an extreme school, who spoke a few years ago of the states as inconvenient appendages to the Union, are learning
from their experience in national admin istration that they are blessings in dis guise.
The more we expand, the more
haps as any such eflort could have been
we are nationalized, the plainer it be
carried at the outset. In it we have before us, for the first time in the history of English law, the fruits of centuries of legal development in the old land, supple mented by the wider experiences of the new. The success of that great under taking has no doubt prompted the project of certain jurists who are now submitting
comes that the national government can not remain efficient if it is overburdened with work that belongs of right to the states. As the states must abide so long as the Union abides, the nation must learn as it grows older to draw all possible benefits from the two systems of law, while minimizing the incon
to the American Bar a most imposing
veniences and conflicts necessarily aris
scheme, to be based on a million-dollar foundation, whose goal is really nothing
ing out of the existence of two systems. Such inconveniences and conflicts have greatly multiplied recently as rapid inter
more than a new American and English Encyclopaedia of law in twenty volumes. It is entirely inaccurate and misleading to speak of such a digest of judge-made
law as “The American Corpus juris.” The Corpus juris of Rome was made up, as everybody knows, of the Code, pub
communication has drawn the states nearer together than ever before, and as the startling growth of governmental power, state and federal, has intruded
published before the close of that year. It was specially provided by statute that they, the Digest and the Code, should
itself, as never before, into the private life of the citizen, following as it does the apothecary to his laboratory, the dairyman to his churn, the butcher to his shambles and the baker to his oven. The widening circle of governmental power has intensified the difliculties afliicting
be regarded as integral parts of one
both commerce and labor by reason, first,
great piece of legislation to be known as the Corpus juris Civilis. That
of conflicting state codes; second, by
term cannot therefore be applied with accuracy or propriety to a digest without
state and federal laws touching the same subject-matter. The result has been an
lished in 529; of the Digest or Pandects, published in 533; and of the Institutes,
reason of the lack of uniformity between
