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 Memorandum in re Corpus juris

83

Appellate Courts of every state in the Union,

"The Supreme Court of the United States

could not but place America in the lead of

is now deciding a large number of the most important constitutional and general questions that affect the whole country. On most of these questions their rulings are controlling. This creates uniformity on those questions, but we may hope for more than that; it prob ably tends to impress upon the Bar and the Bench the vital importance of uniformity in all possible directions, and the further thought

the world in the ﬁeld o! Jurisprudence, and enable her to exercise a more potent inﬂuence

in World Councils.

Each of these propositions will be brieﬂy elaborated as follows:— 1. The proposed statement of the Ameri can Corpus luris would tend to bring about uniformity between the diﬂeront States in the administration of Justice.

This thought is brought out clearly by the Chairman of the Executive Com mittee of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws who, in commenting upon our project,

that this can be reached, to a certain degree,

at least, if Courts, in deciding a question of ﬁrst impression in any particular state, would follow the Supreme Court if it had decided the question, and not, as now, merely add

another decision to one side or the other of a conﬂicting line of cases. The work that you contemplate would emphasize this thought, and that alone would make it worth the doing."

A million-dollari foundation in the

says: “Apart from the great practical inﬂuence it will have upon the every-day practice of law and in cheapening the cost of litigation to the average suitor, there is no one thing which ap peals to me more than the effect it will necessa rily have in bringing about the much needed uni formity between the laws of the several states. As a Commissioner on Uniform State Laws of theCommonwealth of Pennsylvania since 1901 and as Chairman of the Executive Committee of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, I am in a position to realize the inﬂuence of the proposed work in that direction. I therefore want to commend this project in the strongest terms as one which, more than anything else I know, will tend to overcome the unfortunate conﬂict between the states in matters of commercial law and re medial justice, and hasten that uniformity in

both law and procedure so essential to our progress as a nation."

hands of a competent Board of Trustees would make possible not only the imme diate production of such a work as this, but very shortly after its being placed

on the market, the return of the fund intact to the foundation. This statement is based on a most careful calculation.

The only possible flaw in this suggestion is the remote possibility that the work

would not sell as rapidly as other works have and that in consequence the entire outlay would not be restored by the sales. All experience is to the contrary, for the two big law digest ﬁrms are getting rapidly rich with the accumula tions of proﬁts; but if there were a dead loss of two or three hundred thousand dollars, what would that amount to, to a

philanthropist of the Carnegie type in The same thought is emphasized by the former President of the American Bar Association, Francis Rawle, who declares :—

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comparison with the incomparable gain

to the profession and the nation through having such a work? I submit that the question of some possible loss is wholly

". . . something must be done, and I ha'be no doubt that the work if done along the lines you indicate would be immensely better

insigniﬁcant; but our investigations lead

than anything that has heretofore been done,

lined, the foundation fund would not only be intact within two years, but would be increasing rapidly from the proﬁts. In addition to that it would own the copy

and would be not only of great use to the pro fession and the country, but would surely tend to bring about an increased uniformity of law throughout the country.

us to the conclusion that brought out under such auspices and in the way out