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 IVager of Law. have already stated, often furnished their own head-notes with the officially printed opinion. These head-notes were constructed on the plan of stating, in a sort of ascending scale, the various propositions or principles appealed to in argument by the judge who wrote the opinion, coming finally to the pro position in judgment, which constituted a sort of climax. I take leave to express the opinion that they were not the best style of head-notes, and that better head-notes would have been provided by Mr. Wallace, if he had been allowed to perform his function in the particular cases. In the republication of the reports of that court by Little, Brown & Co., under the editorship of Benjamin R. Curtis, who had been a justice of the court, we find an instance of good literary work, lopping off redundancies in the statement, and furnishing a new head-note limited to a statement of what was decided. I cannot but think that the English re porters would serve the profession better if they should follow the same method, and first extract a principle from the case in judgment and state that principle, and then, if it is necessary, add, in the way which they now generally pursue, by way of illustration, what the court decided upon the collection of facts in judgment. This would make their headnotes consist of two parts : 1. The govern ing principle of law. 2. The application of that principle to the particular facts in judg ment. It would resemble one of the proposi tions of " Stephen's Digest of the Law of Evidence," where a rule is stated, and then,

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in order that it may not be misunderstood, an illustration is given. I ask those who uphold the English method of making a syllabus to tell me what they would think of a text-book con structed in this way. What would they think of a legal treatise whose text, instead of developing principles of the law in respect of the subject under discussion and illustrat ing them by apt instances, should confine itself to the instances, and leave the reader to infer the principles? In regard to the manner of stating legal propositions in head-notes, very little can be said which will be of any practical benefit by way of a suggestion to reporters and editors. The homely saw of our English ancestors, that you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and of our French neigh bors, that you cannot make a whistle out of a pig's tail (On ne pent pas faire tin siflet dun queue de cochoti), is here of the most pointed application. Unless a man has a good legal mind, possesses the easy power of grasping legal propositions, he never can be a good reporter. A man cannot clearly express a thing which he does not clearly understand. There are some men to whom the effort of stating a legal proposition is what Curran described it to be, in alluding to an adver sary of his, — the effort of a fool to open an oyster-shell with a rolling-pin. It is idle to attempt to instruct such reporters. You cannot reconstruct their brains nor confer upon them a capacity with which Nature has not originally endowed them.

WAGER OF LAW. ' I "HERE is a charm in antiquity, the force of which we all feel and acknowledge. It lends an additional value to many of those things that we esteem the highest. We love an old friend, a bottle of old wine, an old coin, an old picture, an old statue, an old

manuscript, an old book. To the same latent virtue we are probably to attribute the strong attachment of the legal profession to old laws and institutions, and hence the zeal of our legal writers to trace back all that is valuable in both .to the remotest period. We cling