Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/53

25 First, and most important, is the difficulty alluded to at the out- set, and perhaps already sufficiently dwelt upon, viz, the danger necessarily arising from brevity. While agreeing with the Law Quarterly Review, that " it is hardly fair to find fault with a maxim for its brevity," one must also agree with the further statement of the Review, that " brevity should make us beware." Not only is the meaning of short phrases peculiarly liable to misapprehension, but there are frequent mistakes as to their scope and application. Lord Bacon said : " This delivering of knowledge in distinct and disjoined aphorisms does leave the wit of man more free to turn and toss, and to make use of that which is so delivered to more several purposes and applications." But there is certainly the accompanying danger that " the wit of man " is very likely to turn and twist these aphorisms to purposes not intended by their framers.

Second, the fact that the great majority of legal maxims are clothed in the words of a dead language has had, in some instances, the effect of preventing proper inquiry into their meaning. A phrase couched in Latin seems to some persons invested with ** a kind of mysterious halo." Of course Judge Lord was right when he said : " There is nothing of mystery or of sanctity in the words of a dead language." But no one who reflects on the subject can doubt that some useless Latin maxims, and some untrue Latin maxims have continued current, and that other Latin maxims have been misapplied, when this would not have happened if those maxims had been expressed only in the vernacular. How else can we account for the way in which certain phrases are put forward as containing the reason for a rule, when the same phrase reduced into plain Enghsh is obviously nothing more than a restatement of the rule itself? A phrase, when put to such a use, may fairly be characterized as a " question-begging maxim." It is not an explanation ; " it is merely an artificial statement of the thing to be explained ;" it is " dogma, not reasoning."

Lord Bacon tells us that he put the maxims in Latin, because he regarded that language " as the briefest to contrive the rules compendiously, the aptest for memory, and of the greatest author- ity and majesty to be vouched and alleged in argument." No