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 412

The Green Bag

ened, and more than half of the material

is entirely new, the length having been increased words.

from

779,000 to 2,035,000

The appearance of the new Dillon on Municipal Corporations is thus an event of signal and profound importance.

The work at once claims a position for itself among the half-dozen leading text-books dealing with American law ever written, if, indeed, not as the

most

important

country

since

produced Kent's

in

this

Commentaries

and Story on the Constitution. It would be hard to ﬁnd a more strik ing monument to the industry of a single man, or to the protracted labor of a life now nearing its eightieth milestone. It was in the well-supplied law library

law of municipal corporations, and this research, in which he had the services of neither stenographer nor assistant, occupied all his available time for about

six years.

Besides consulting hundreds

of volumes of reports, he investigated every English publication relating to the subject. There was little to guide the author in the arrangement of his materials, and his task was thus the more difficult. Filled with the desire to give his treatise the greatest possible practical utility, and realizing that the greater portion of those who would use his work would not have ready access

to large law libraries, he voluntarily shouldered the labor of setting out in

extended footnotes the general facts underlying the adjudications. In the

of James Grant of Davenport, Iowa,

course of time, in 1872, the work appeared

that Judge Dillon ﬁtted himself for

and at once met with a favorable re ception from bench and bar. The trea

the bar, and he has said that it was in this library that the desire to write a

treatise on municipal corporations must have been ﬁrst aroused. While an occupant of

the Supreme

bench

of

Iowa, he became possessed with the wish to write a legal work which might serve the needs of judges and practi tioners alike, and he could not have

made a happier selection of a subject, for the law of municipal corporations was then in a state of much uncertainty,

and no other branch either of public or of private law touches more closely the lives of American citizens. In the Grant law library he found complete

sets of the state reports, and the inter vals between terms of court were devoted to a laborious and systematic explora

tise soon came to be frequently cited by the courts as a standard authority.

Succeeding editions saw it enlarged and brought up to date, and in the present

edition

all

fourth of

the

decisions since

the

1890 have been examined,

resulting in the citation of many thou sand new cases and a great ampliﬁcation of the text in which their doctrines are expounded.

The accuracy of Judge Dillon's methods and his gift for exposition are well known through the former editions. The most striking characteristic of his work is the wonderful thoroughness with which it has been done. This great law book has been erected on a

Maine, he set out to examine all the

ﬁrm foundation of painstaking attention to the smallest details and ﬁnest rami ﬁcations of an intricate subject. Not the method of easy generalization, but that of patient and tireless dissection, has been followed. The result is a structure exceptionally ﬁrm in its ma

cases in the reports dealing with the

sonry, analytical rather than specula

tion of the trackless wilderness of case law of whose formidable proportions

Judge Dillon has

written

elsewhere

with a vividness born of personal ex

perience.

Beginning with the state of