Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/66

38 38 HARVARD LAW RE VIE W. Our last examination of the Year Books was in 1440 ; let us come down fifty years later, to 1490, 5 Hen. VII. In the Year Book for that year we find fifty-three cases, filling forty-one folios. Excluding reporters' notes, there are probably nine places where either court or counsel use ^^ ceo est adjuge'' or other like expres- sion, — five times with a reference to the year (17 pi. 9; 23 pi. 4, bis ; 25 pi. 7; 28 pi. 9) and four times without (4 pi. 9; 8 pi. 17; 15 pi. 14; 38 pi. 3). In three other places cases are referred to without name, but somewhat more at length (12 pi. 4; 16 pi. 9; 28 pi. 9) ; and in 19 pi. i, the case of Boham v. Bishop of Lincoln, 33 Hen. VI. 12; 34 Hen. VI. 38, was relied on by counsel, but re- pudiated by Bryan, C. J., who said the law would not be held as it was there. The last year which appears in the Year Books is 27 Hen. VIII. 1535, and of it only three terms are reported. Judicial decisions are more frequently cited; still the references are not numerous. Descending a generation, we come across one of the most famous and accurate of reporters, and the one perhaps who reported what passed in court at the greatest length, Edmund Plowden. The first ten cases in his second volume, not including the pleadings, fill over fifty folios or one hundred pages, and an examination of them yields the following result : Cases cited and stated as author- ity, seventeen ; legal propositions cited from cases, five ; cases cited but disallowed, two ; in all, twenty-four cases referred to. It is fair to remark, however, that in other reporters of the same period a somewhat larger number of references to decisions will be found, and that Plowden himself in one place speaks of his having omitted " many good cases " referred to by the judges. The practice of citation blossomed out in Lord Coke. Open- ing in the middle of his reports, we find in the first twenty-five folios of the seventh volume, two hundred and twenty-eight (228) references to cases, — an average twenty times greater than that of Plowden. Although later judges and writers have not been so prolific as Lord Coke, yet the importance attached to precedents has dimin- ished but little since his time, and, as said above, the rule of the common law is that, aside from their intrinsic merits as the ex- pression of the opinion of able and learned persons, the actual decisions of a court are of great weight with that court and all co-ordinate courts, and are absolutely binding upon all inferior courts.