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 The Uniﬁcation of American Law By HANNIS TAYLOR T has been estimated that in the

under titles and divided into three books,

France of the tenth century there were three hundred and sixty diﬁerent kinds or groups of customary laws. Sometimes a custom prevailed through

preceded by a preliminary title. It was the ﬁnal product of the fusion of the customary laws, wholly excluding all feudal laws and customs, of royal ordi

out an entire province, at others it was

nances and laws of the Revolution, and

conﬁned to a city or town, or to some

of the vital principles of Roman private law stated with the greatest possible clearness and brevity.

small locality. Only with the history of such precedent conditions clearly in view can we grasp the real nature of the marvelous work of codiﬁcation made

possible at last by that abrupt and pro found break with the past known as the French Revolution. The necessity for such a work grew out of such a ter

rible complication of laws as had never existed in any other country, a condi tion prompting Voltaire to declare that

a traveler in France changed horses not oftener than he changed laws. The effort to work a reform through the creation of a uniform code began in the

Constituent Assembly with dreamers of the Rousseau school,who claimed that it should be “as simple as nature," so plain that any adult could understand it without extrinsic aid. But the work thus inaugurated never began in earnest

On January 1, 1900, just a century after Tronchet and his colleagues began to draft the Code Napoléon, was oﬁi cially promulgated a new general code

for the whole German Empire.

We

should be able to look with conﬁdence for an outline of that code to the world

famous jurist, Dr. Rudolph Sohm, who was the leading member of the com mission that made it. From him we learn that the re-establishment of the

German Empire was necessary to the re-establishment of German law; that

that law, as embodied in the Civil Code, “is compiled principally from the vari ous provincial codes before mentioned,

and notably from those of Prussia and Saxony.” He had told us long before

that “it would be a mistake to suppose

ished in about four years, was adopted

that the framers of these codes (the Prussian Landrecht, etc.) were suddenly inspired with some new and original wisdom. The codes were of course con structed on the basis of the law as it

by'the legislature and published in 1804, with all the reports and discussions in

previously existed. Inasmuch, then, as prior to these codes (1'. 2., from the recep

the Tribunate and Council of State,

tion of Roman law in the sixteenth century down to the end of the eighteenth) the law of the Pandects had subsidiary force as law throughout the whole of Germany, these codes must, of course, have been framed more par

until

1800, when

Napoleon,

as

First

Consul, appointed Tronchet as the head of a commission which completed the draft in four months. The entire work, ﬁn

showing the original draft and all changes

made in it. Thus out of a prolonged and critical process ﬁnally emerged the most famous modern code of substantive law, consisting of 2,281 sections, arranged