Page:Nash v. Lathrop.pdf/2

560 of the reports of the decisions of the supreme judicial court, and respondent has no right to publish the same, or furnish the same for publication, without the consent of Little, Brown & Co.; that heretofore the petitioner has been permitted, by the respondent, with the consent of said Little, Brown & Co., to take abstracts of opinions for publication, but that recently the West Publishing Company, of St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Lawyers’ Co-operative Publishing Company, of New York, and other foreign publishers, have availed themselves of the liberty thus granted the petitioner to publish the decisions of the court in the form of Reports, for sale to the profession, in competition with the authorized series of Reports, and to the injury of said Little, Brown & Co., and to the prejudice of the rights secured them by said contract and statute; and that for this reason the respondent, at the request of said Little, Brown & Co., has refused, and claims that he is bound to refuse, petitioner the privilege of copying and abstracting opinions for publication. The presiding justice before whom the petition was heard has found that the statements of fact in the answer are true.

The questions whether the state has an absolute property in the opinions of the justices after they are filed with the reporter; whether it has a copyright in such opinions which it can exercise itself, or assign to an individual; and whether a copyright on the volumes of the Reports covers such opinions so as to prevent any person from publishing them after they have been published in the volumes of the Reports,—are not necessarily involved in this case. It may be decided upon a narrower question, which is whether the state has granted to Little, Brown & Co. that exclusive right of the first publication of the opinions of the justices; in other words, whether it has conferred upon that firm the power of saying that the opinions shall not be made public until they are published in their reports.

The decisions and opinions of the justices are the authorized expositions and interpretations of the laws, which are binding upon all the citizens. They declare the unwritten law, and construe and declare the meaning of the statutes. Every citizen is presumed to know the law thus declared, and it needs no argument to show that justice requires that all should have free access to the opinions, and that it is against sound public policy to prevent this, or to suppress and keep from the earliest knowledge of the public the statutes, or the decisions and opinions of the justices. Such opinions stand, upon principle, on substantially the same footing as the statutes enacted by the legislature. It can hardly be contended that it would be within the constitutional power of the legislature to enact that the statutes and opinions should not be made known to the public. It is its duty to provide for promulgating them; while it has the power to pass reasonable and wholesome laws regulating the mode of promulgating them, so as to give accuracy and authority to them. We are not called upon to consider what is the extent or the limitation of this power, because we are satisfied that it was not the intention of the legislature, in the statute upon which the respondent relies, to limit the previously existing right of the citizen to