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The Green Bag

time submitted their disputes to a spe cially constituted tribunal or commis sion. As was the case in the early Roman period, the arbitral body was named voluntarily and mutually, and the enforcement of an award remained as a matter of right with the successful litigant. What an award did then it does now, that is, it practically declared that the party in whose favor it was rendered was justly entitled to resort to self-redress in case the other party de clined to abide by the decision. Having shown the close analogy be tween this early Roman method of determining rights in controversy and the method practised so long by nations, Mr. Scott takes up the next develop ment in the judicial institutions of Rome. He shows that through the same agency of custom the litigants were in time limited by law in the selection of an arbiter to a special group of individuals, a panel, which at first consisted of the members of the Roman Senate. Still in this second stage of evolution the submission was by contract, as was the selection of the arbiter, and the state was not charged with the enforcement of the decision, which operated in the same way as in the earlier period in that it clothed the successful party with the right of execution. In this second step in development Mr. Scott sees the same step in advance taken by the nations at The Hague Conference of 1899, when they established a panel of jurists from which governments might select arbitrators to decide controver sies and to which panel their selection was limited. As in the case of litigants of the Roman Republic the choice of a judge or judges, though limited, was by contract, the submission was by contract, and the award was enforce able by the successful party as a direct consequence of the contractual relation.

This, says Mr. Scott, is the present stage reached in the development of an international judiciary. The nations of the world have unconsciously followed the exact line of growth which was fol lowed by the Roman people in develop ing the judicial system, which is the foundation of the systems of nearly all modern states. The progress that has been made internationally is in accord with the law of evolution manifested in the history of Roman institutions. There remains for the world to take the final step, as it was taken by Rome, and establish a tribunal limited as to num bers, with a permanent membership, not subject to the will of the parties but named by the community of na tions regardless of the particular case to be submitted to it. But Mr. Scott does not rest his law of the evolution of judicial institutions on Roman history alone. He goes further and points out that the Supreme Court of the United States as a tribunal for the settlement of interstate contro versies went through the same stages of evolution. From the Declaration of Independence to the present time there have been three types of government in this country; first, the Revolutionary until July, 1778; second, the Con federate until 1789; and third, the federal after 1789. Under the Revo lutionary government the only method for settling disputes between the thir teen sovereign commonwealths was by mutual selection of commissioners or arbitrators and by mutual submission of questions to them, and self-redress was the sole means of enforcing their deci sion. The conditions seem to be identical with those of the early Roman period and those existing internationally prior to 1899. By the Articles of Confederation of 1778 the second step in the develop