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The Green Bag. pay no attention to it. The Constitution, said the Chief-Justice, authorized the court to appoint a reporter; and as the composition of syllabi had time out of mind been the only duty of any consequence that pertained to such a functionary, the act, if valid, would destroy the whole force of the provision. The judges, therefore, would not write headnotes upon compulsion; but for some time Judge Cooley furnished syllabi for his opinions, because he did not like those that were then published in the " Northwestern Reporter," which at that time did not do as good work as it does now. Of course, as offic ial reporter, I got the benefit of this, for it lightened my own work considerably, and I need hardly say that I never assumed to alter in any respect a judge's interpretation of his own views. I did not, on the other hand, care to absorb the credit for his work, nor perhaps to take the responsibility for it, and so I carefully credited every judicial syllabus to its author. A later experience showed that this sort of honesty was also the best policy. It was the custom to send advance sheets of the reports to the judges, and for a while Judge Cooley, in particular, was in the habit of revising his own opinions in galleys. It thus became possible to detect and remedy occasional editorial errors before final publication. I was once obliged to be absent for the greater part of a term, and one of the judges good-naturedly furnished me with his own headnotes to a number of the opinions he himself had filed while I was gone. When the volume in which they were afterward printed was going through the press, I received a letter from another judge criticising rather sharply the two head-notes that constituted the entire syllabus to a certain short opinion. Me said I seemed to have missed the point in both of these head-notes. On looking up the case I found it was one of those for which I had the learned author's own notes, which I had printed verbatim; so that I had nothing to say except that the notes were not mine, but those of the judge who wrote the opinion. Naturally, I never heard any thing more about it. This incident, aside from its ridiculous features, helps to suggest the reason why judicial head-notes are not found to be altogether satisfactory. It is not that the work of a reporter calls for any special qualification. Any one who can see a point ought to be able to state it. Nor can it be supposed that the judge who did not write the opinion knew what it meant better than the one who did; nor that either of them was unskilled in the art of expression, for both had previously done excellent work in reporting. The reason seems to be that in making a head-note the judge is apt to exercise the same freedom that he used in writing his opinion, and instead of limiting himself to that document, to go outside of it, so that however correct in law his note may be, it is not borne out by the opinion. The reporter knows that he has no business to do this, and so he sets down nothing that is not expressed in the language of the opinion or necessarily to be inferred from it. But the advance of co operative reporting renders the phenomena and the speculations upon it of small consequence. I have known the judicial head-note to serve at least one good turn, and that was by way of a corrective upon the opinion. One of our judges once told me that he had tested an opinion of his by writing a syllabus to it; and being satisfied from the bald statements of the syllabus that the law therein laid down was bad, he rewrote the opinion.