Page:The Wisconsin idea (IA cu31924032449252).pdf/235

 Professor Howard L. Smith is the authority for the following statement:—

"There are in America alone over six thousand volumes of decisions of fifty or sixty different tribunals, and these are being added to at the rate of from one to two hundred volumes per annum. The common law is being further developed, illustrated, and made by the courts of Great Britain and all her widespread colonies. The number of volumes of precedents that these add every year to the common law, I have not attempted to compute, but it is certainly appalling. The shelves of our libraries groan under them, and the lawyers are being driven out of their offices by their books.

"An advertisement of a recent encyclopedia of law boasts that it has 8559 citations on the subject of adverse possession, while its leading competitor has only a paltry 4999. On the subject of abatement and revival it has 5015 and on appeal and error 47,000. Amid this bog of precedents the lawyer of to-day must stumble, groping earnestly, but often vainly, for a clue which shall lead him to the truth. It is probable that the number of citations on the one subject of appeal and error in this encyclopedia is greater than the real number of precedents on all legal subjects in existence a century ago; but the mad race of precedents is only begun, and will of course increase in the future in an ascending ratio, until in the near future they will he counted by the tens and the hundreds of thousands or millions.

"That the lawyer desiring to advise his client as to some simple, readily foreseeable question of law should be obliged to consult hundreds of volumes, and thousands of precedents, perhaps only at the end to find that there is a hopeless division of authority, and that he knew just as much about it in the beginning as at the