Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/580

 566 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY to the Court of Cassation and a system of law has been built up on judicial decisions similar in character and compara- ble in amount to that built up in England in the same way during the same period. There is, for instance, a French law of libel which must be learned, not from the code but from the pages of Dalloz and the Pandectes Fr^n9aises, just as our law of libel must be studied in the law reports and the digests. Even if a point is apparently covered by an express provision of the code, judicial decisions may affix a meaning to the provision which can be known only to a student of law. Thus the French Code appears to lay down the proposition that capacity to contract is governed by the law of the party's nation, yet the French courts refuse to apply this principle, and instead of it apply the French law of capac- ity in each case where the other party to the agreement is a Frenchman who acted bona fide or where the party to be bound was commorant and doing business in France. These are two examples only out of many that might be cited of the failure of the code to fulfill the hopes of its individualist sponsor. If we leave the French Code and come to those in our own country, we shall find the same process going on. The law of California has been developed in much the same way since the adoption of the code as before, and the common law decisions of other states are as freely cited by her courts as authority as if her own law had never been codified. The uncertainty and confusion caused by the adoption of the New York Civil Code of Procedure is a well-known scandal. It is true that Bentham objected to the French Code as imperfect and made upon the wrong principle, and that Field objected to the New York Code of Civil Procedure as finally adopted. These objections were most characteristic. Every codifier desires not merely a code but his own code, and will not be satisfied with any other. Hence it follows that no complete code can be adopted which would be satisfactory to many experts in law. Furthermore, no codifier will be satis- fied to accept the judgment of a court or any body of other men upon the meaning of his code, nor to accept the inter- pretation of the executive department on the proper execution