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The Green Bag

accessible is to be found in the profusion with which Diocletian and his successors had used their legislative power, ﬂood

statutory authority corresponding with

ing the Empire with a mass of ordinances which few persons could procure or

American Encyclopaedia or Pandects of judge-made law, with no statutory

master. Certainly we now stand in a like situation. The noblest effort so far made to bring order out of the inco

auth0rity,—a compilation “the big law publishing ﬁrms” can construct with far more skill and success than any inex

herent mass is that embodied in the

perienced foundation,—but a code, a

monumental work known as the Ameri can and English Encyclopaedia of Law,

typical code of American state law, which each state can voluntarilyadopt as its own with the least change possible. Statesmen

whose value to the legal profession can hardly be estimated. In its volumes the American lawyer was permitted to look upon the result of the ﬁrst serious attempt to reduce, systematize and re ﬁne the essence of our substantive law, state and federal, carried as far per

only one of its three elements,—the

Pandects.

What we need is not a new

of an extreme school, who spoke a few years ago of the states as inconvenient appendages to the Union, are learning

from their experience in national admin istration that they are blessings in dis guise.

The more we expand, the more

haps as any such eﬂort could have been

we are nationalized, the plainer it be

carried at the outset. In it we have before us, for the ﬁrst time in the history of English law, the fruits of centuries of legal development in the old land, supple mented by the wider experiences of the new. The success of that great under taking has no doubt prompted the project of certain jurists who are now submitting

comes that the national government can not remain efficient if it is overburdened with work that belongs of right to the states. As the states must abide so long as the Union abides, the nation must learn as it grows older to draw all possible beneﬁts from the two systems of law, while minimizing the incon

to the American Bar a most imposing

veniences and conﬂicts necessarily aris

scheme, to be based on a million-dollar foundation, whose goal is really nothing

ing out of the existence of two systems. Such inconveniences and conﬂicts have greatly multiplied recently as rapid inter

more than a new American and English Encyclopaedia of law in twenty volumes. It is entirely inaccurate and misleading to speak of such a digest of judge-made

law as “The American Corpus juris.” The Corpus juris of Rome was made up, as everybody knows, of the Code, pub

communication has drawn the states nearer together than ever before, and as the startling growth of governmental power, state and federal, has intruded

published before the close of that year. It was specially provided by statute that they, the Digest and the Code, should

itself, as never before, into the private life of the citizen, following as it does the apothecary to his laboratory, the dairyman to his churn, the butcher to his shambles and the baker to his oven. The widening circle of governmental power has intensiﬁed the diﬂiculties aﬂiicting

be regarded as integral parts of one

both commerce and labor by reason, ﬁrst,

great piece of legislation to be known as the Corpus juris Civilis. That

of conﬂicting state codes; second, by

term cannot therefore be applied with accuracy or propriety to a digest without

state and federal laws touching the same subject-matter. The result has been an

lished in 529; of the Digest or Pandects, published in 533; and of the Institutes,

reason of the lack of uniformity between