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The Green Bag

the country as a whole, and to preserve the right proportion between his judicial opinions and the mass of case law to which they must usually be, in point of quantity, but an insignificant addi tion. The moment he realizes how little he is really adding to the sum total of case law already in force, he will see how futile, how vainglorious, and how devoid of good taste is an opinion of even moderate length covering settled points of law. But brevity while it would alleviate would not remedy the evil. There is perhaps one other possible remedy be sides those which have been above sug gested. The confusion with which the American lawyer is confronted arises from the fact that there are so many state jurisdictions handing down opinions independently of one another. There is nothing inconvenient in our two-fold state and national jurisdiction in itself. Every lawyer can post himself easily with regard to the progress of case law in the highest courts of his own state and the United States. It is the pur suit of simultaneous decisions in a multi tude of states which offers an insur mountable problem. The proposal which we are about to make is that in place of the state reports now issued separately by the several states, there be a single official compilation of all the state re ports made by one competent editor-inchief aided by his staff of law reporters, together acting as a quasi-national com mission maintained by the co-operation of all the states. Imagine the teeming mass of unpub lished state reports pouring into one central office, to pass through the neces sary processes of analysis and classifica tion, and take their proper place, after passing through the hands of several ex perts, in a compendium of current case law. That such a commission might

perform this work most advantageously, individual members should be held re sponsible for different fields. One ex pert, for example, might have charge of the law of corporations, another that of contracts, another that of real property, and so on. All the typewritten decisions, as fast as they were received, would be assigned to separate departments, according to the subjects treated. A decision dealing with corporation law would go to the head of the department in charge of that subject, who would be a leading authority upon the law of corporations. He would first determine whether the case decided any new point of law or not. He would then decide whether to publish a full report, a brief abstract, or merely a note giving a clue to court records. He or one of his associates would discover other important matters touched upon besides the law of cor porations; the case would be referred from one department to another; and a point would at last be reached where it could go no further. The result would be a compilation of case law arranged not by states but by subjects. The important cases would be reported in complete form, and the less important ones more briefly, those of no importance from the point of view of legal development being sum marized in succinct footnotes or wholly ignored. The compilers would bring to their task not simply the accuracy of the law reporter, but the discrim ination of the jurist. They would in no sense attempt a digest or consoli dation of case law, but they would place at the disposal of the reader, in a logical arrangement and in a form convenient of access, all the essentials of a com prehensive perspective of contempo rary case law. Were national codification, carried out