Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/207

179 UNIVERSITY TEACHING OF ENGLISH LAW. ^79 fall into the order of common experience and rational thought. Sir Henry Maine's book, like that of Darwin in a different sphere, at about the same time, created an epoch. Such books have made it impossible for the law student ever again to be content with the sort of food that fed his fathers, with that ** disorderly mass of crabbed pedantry," for instance, as our recent historians of the law have justly called it, "that Coke poured forth as institutes of English law." Never again can he receive the spirit of bondage that once bent itself to teach or to study the law through such a medium.^ And now comes another labor for the legal scholar. After such researches as I have indicated, in any part of the law, the outcome of it is certain to be the necessity of restating the subject in hand. When things have once been thus explored and traced, many a hitherto unobserved relationship of ideas come to light, many an old one vanishes, many a new explanation of current doctrines is suggested and many a disentangling of confused topics, many a clearing away of ambiguities, of false theories, of outworn and unintelligible phraseology. There is no such dissolver and ration- alizer of technicality as this. A new order arises. And so when the work of exploration has been gone over, there comes the time for producing and publishing the results of it. Admirable work of this sort, and a good bulk of it, has already been done, — work that is certain to be of inestimable value to our profession. In some instances it is but little known as yet ; in others, it appears already in our handbooks on both sides of the ocean, and in the decisions of the courts. The publishing of these results by competent persons is one of the chief benefits which we may expect from the thorough and scientific teaching of law at the universities. In no respect can more be done to aid our courts in their great and diffcult task. There are many useful handbooks for office use and reference, and some excellent ones. But the number of really good English law treatises — good, I mean, when measured by a high standard — is very few indeed. They improve ; and yet, to a great extent to-day, the writers and publishers of lawbooks are abusing the confidence of the profession, and practising upon its necessities. ' In saying of Coke what is just quoted, it will be observed that he is dealt with as a writer of institutes of the law. Of course that great name stands for much else in our law and our constitutional history, — for much which is great and good and never to be forgotten.