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 The Green Bag VOL. XVIII.

No. 10

BOSTON

OCTOBER, 1906

THE CONGESTION OF LAW BY HON. ALTON B. PARKER FEW questions have been more discussed have marked all the history of men. It during recent years than the increasing may create an office strange to a given tendency of legislative bodies to propose county or state, lodge additional power in and to enact new laws. Scarcely any the hands of an executive, attempt to ex agitation of a public or a moral question pand or contract the judicial authority, or is so unimportant that it does not produce, seek to regulate or modify by law habits in nearly half a hundred state capitols, a and customs; but it proposes nothing series of bills supposed to represent it in hitherto untried somewhere. It has long been recognized that, if our all its varied and shifting phases. It has become far more common to look for a legislators were compelled to study and new law for the punishment of an old know the old and settled principles of offense or for defining anew the relations jurisprudence, there would be fewer op of individuals to each other than it is to portunities for mediocre men to make for invoke those powers or remedies by which, themselves reputations, or even to base over many centuries, while law has been careers, outwardly successful, upon laws gradually taking fixed form, men have which have nothing in them that mankind been able to punish crimes against society, has not tried. It is merely another illus or to settle their own differences. tration of the refusal of men to profit by And yet every man who has had oc the experience of their ancestors or pre casion to study the question, even in its decessors, or to take account of the long narrower bearings, has been forced to con line of failures; but its fatuity is in claim clude that but a small percentage of pro ing credit for something well known al posed new enactments involves a new prin ready. It was one of the many wise sayings of ciple, or even a new policy. It rarely happens that an offense is committed for Montesquieu that : "It sometimes is necessary to change which no proper punishment has been pro vided, and it is a long time since any certain laws, but the case is rare, and, real question has arisen between men to when it occurs, one should touch them demand legal settlement impossible under only with a trembling hand." If this were taken to heart by the mem existing law. Most of the laws proposed in such num bers of Congress and of the state legis ber and variety are assertions of the police latures of the American Union, who an power. Even the machinery which they nually turn out an average of nearly create — under the fond delusion that it is fifteen thousand laws — two thirds of them new — is as old as Western civilization it devoted to private or special questions — self. It thus connotes a continual growth it is certain that there would be greater from the comparatively simple conditions satisfaction, both individual and public; of our modern life, at its best, into the more knowledge of what the law has done variety, complexity, and interference which and can do, and more respect for it; fewer