Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/581

 17. BEALE: JURISPRUDENCE 567 of the law. It will follow that each codifier of the Benthamite type must be legislature, judge, and sheriff, and the logical result (like the logical result of all individualism carried to an extreme) is anarchy. This failure of the hope of the individualistic codifiers and the change in the spirit of the age have affected our ideal of codification. The purpose of the modern codifiers is not to state the law completely, but to unify the law of a country which at present has many systems of law, or to state the law in a more artistic way. In other words, the spirit of the modern codifiers is not individualistic but centralizing. Thus the modern European codes of Italy, Spain, and Germany were adopted in countries where a number of different sys- tems of law prevailed, and the purpose of codification in each state was principally to adopt one system of law for the whole country, and incidentally to make the expression of the law conform to the results of legal scholarship. The same purpose is at the basis of the American Commission for the Uniformity of Legislation. The purpose of the English codifiers appears to be merely an artistic one. It cannot be better expressed than by the last great disciple of Bentham, Professor Holland. The law expressed in a code, he says, " has no greater pretensions to finality than when expressed in statutes and reported cases. Clearness, not finality, is the object of a code. It does not attempt impossibilities, for it is satisfied with presenting the law at the precise stage of elaboration at which it finds it ; neither is it obstructively rigid, for deductions from the general to the particular and ' the competition of opposite analogies ' are as available for the decision of new cases under a code, as under any other form in which the law may be embodied. ... It defines the terminus a quo, the general principle from which all legal arguments must start. . . . The task to which Bentham devoted the best powers of his intellect has still to be commenced. The form in which our law is ex- pressed remains just what it was." Such a code as he describes is really very far from the ideal of Bentham. It does not do away with judge-made law; it does not enable the individual to know the law for