Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 22.pdf/485

 American Editorial Comment upon the Corpus Juris Project undertaking. If its value to the community were adequately understood, it ought to be possible to procure the endowment. It is as legitimate a subject for endowment as a library, a hospital, or a university. A plan for carrying into execution this great work, long desired by the bar, has now been so far deﬁnitely formed as to receive a full exposition and a hearty indorsement from the Green Bag, a leading conservative law journal. We slightly abbreviate, but in its own words, that journal's estimate of the men who are planning the work:— A more happy combination than that of the three men who are planning this great undertaking could not have been found. Mr. Alexander unites with the physique of an athlete. the clear mind of a scholarly thinker and the executive ability of a magnetic and indefatigable organizer. Dr. Andrews is ajurist of remarkable powers of analysis, of classiﬁcation and exposition. a master of the science of jurisprudence. to the study of which he has devoted himself with grwt industry. having proved himself one of the great constructive legal minds of the age. Dean Kirchwey. of Columbia Law School. enjoys a national reputation as a teacher and writer. is a former President of the Association of American Law Schools. and is admirably qualiﬁed for editorial duties requiring extensive knowledge of the work of the country's ablest law professors and writers.

The Outlook agrees with the Green Bag that “the undertaking could not be in safer hands." Demanded alike by the interests of the profession and of business men, in dorsed without dissent by the ablest lawyers and jurists, with law scholars of distinguished ability ready to undertake it, the work needs only some man of ﬁnancial ability to provide the necessary funds. Such an undertaking carried to completion would be at once a. great service and a great honor to the country. Literary Digest: TO CLEAR OUR LEGAL JUNGLE Few people who go to law probably realize the risk they run of suﬁering injustice at the hands of judges and lawyers to whom the law itself is a confused chaos of uncertainties "Bench and bar alike," says a writer in the Green Bag (Boston, February), “have been and are ﬂoundering in the mazes of un organized, unsystematized, and often con flicting rules and decisions." A New York banker is quoted as saying that "the greatest risk in business is the legal risk," and William B. Hornblower, eat-president of the New York

State

Bar Association,

declares

that

459 "the

present condition of the law is little short of appalling." A Berlin jurist, who recently came to America to prosecute legal research, remarks that very soon he found himself "lost between hundreds and thousands of unsystematized decisions without any possi bility of systematizing them myself." The deplorable result of this confusion is that much needless litigation crowds and clogs the courts, delays justice, and often defeats

it. "It is often impossible," says Mr. Justice Day, of the Supreme Court, "for counsel to give legal advice competent to guide their

clients in doing what the law sanctions and approves, and refraining from disobeying the law, which, if litigation follows, they are presumed to know." To clear this legal jungle or jumble Mr.

Lucien

Hugh Alexander presents in the

magazine named above a scheme conceived and worked out by Dr. James Dewitt Andrews, Prof. George W. Kirchwey, and

himself.

It might seem to the layman an

impossible task to systematize into a well ordered whole the fomiidable mass of laws and decisions of the federal and state legislatures and courts. But, as Mr. Justice Holmes observes, "the number of our pre cedents when generalized and reduced to a system, is not unmanageably large," and "they present themselves as a ﬁnite body of dogma, which may be mastered within a reasonable time." Judge Dillon, too, says that while "the number of cases is legion," yet “the principles they establish are com paratively few, capable of being thoroughly mastered and capable also of direct and in telligent statement." . . . The authors of this scheme have gone so far as to ﬁgure out the actual cost of producing order out of chaos, and they set the ﬁgure at $600,000. They boldly ask some multi~

millionaire to come forward with this sum. . . . The codes of Justinian and Napoleon will preserve their fame as long as laws and justice endurkwhy should not some American capitalist secure immortality on the same terms? Prof. Roscoe Pound, of the University of Chicago, writes:—

"It has been said that the crimes of a Bona parte and the bigotry of a. Justinian will be forgotten because at their bidding the rough places in the way of justice were made smooth. The patron under whose auspices the way of American justice shall be made smooth