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After the Crown ceased to supply the courts with reporters, the business of preserving the important decisions of judges was undertaken by a succession of eminent lawyers, among the number being Coke and Plovvden. Law reporters grew so numerous after the Res toration, that a diminution in their number was regarded as imperative, and an act was passed prohibiting the publication of law books without the license of the judges. The rapid increase of reporters had, how ever, no peculiar relation to the restoration of the Stuarts, for Bulstrode, the foremost

reporter during the Commonwealth, alluded to the multiplicity of reports in these pictur esque terms : " Of late we have found so many wandering and masterless reports, like the soldiers of Cadmus, daily rising up and jost ling each other, that our learned judges have been forced to provide against their multiplic ity by disallowing of some posthumous reports, well considering that as laws arc the anchors of the 'republic, so the reports are as anchors of laws, and therefore ought to be well weighed before being put out." — Dublin Globe.

THE BARBARIAN CODES. BY GUY CARLETON LEE. FOR centuries Rome imposed her legal system upon the world. But the time arrived when the world was no longer the shores of an " Italian lake" and the Roman Law found rivals. It is true that at no period could these rivals claim a position or pres tige comparable with the system that ema nated from the Tiber or the Bosporus, yet in certain districts and for considerable periods barbarian codes rivaled and even temporarily triumphed over the Roman Law. In considering the Barbarian Codes, socalled, we are working in the sources of Ger manic law. We are investigating the begin nings of those great systems which, in their subsequent developments and alterations, have, and are, dominating the Europe of to day. It is beyond the scope of this paper to at tempt to mention all those barbarian codes that have been preserved in whole or in part, and those which are known to us through evidence dehors the texts are equally foreign to our inquiry. It will be sufficient for our purpose to consider several typical collec tions of laws or codes. At the outset it is a matter of prime ne

cessity that we should agree upon matters of terminology. We must, therefore, think of a code as a collection of legal prescrip tions relative to this or that people. Each tribe had its code and these have to a large extent been preserved and are to-day acces sible to scholars through the principal libra ries of the world. The price and rarity of the best modern editions of the texts pre clude their general possession by students.1 1 It is well to note the following collections: — Canfiant, Harharorum leges antiquae. Venice. 17811789. 5 books in 3 vol. folio. ¡f'alttr. Corpus juris germanici antiqui, 1824. 3 vol. Complete, but its value is greatly diminished by recent re search that has rendered much of Walter's work and texts obsolete. Gengier, Germanische Kechtsdenkmäler. 187*;. Pertz, Monumenta Germ, hist., Leges. 5 vol. folio. Also Leges nationum germanicarum, in 410. Bitner, De Germano lege sua vívente, in Diener, Opuscula académica, 1830. T. I.ff. 427-440. Klimralh, Travaux sur l'histoire du droit français, eil. Warnkönig, 'Г. I. 1843, ff. 342-351. Daroud-Oshlou, Histoire de la législation des anciens Germains, Berlin, 1845, 2 vols. Stobbe, I'ersonalilät und Territorialität des Rechts uml die (irundsät/e des .Mittelalters über die collisio statutorum, in Jahrbuch des gemeinen deutschen Rechts, T. vi. iS6j, ff. i -6o. Schroder, Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechlsgeschichte T. I. 1887, ff. 219-256.