THE DOCTRINE OF STARE DECISIS 643 



a greater decrease of efficiency where they are not. Even the keeping 

 up of a set of reports of the various courts of a large state and of 

 the United States is becoming an expense to be seriously considered 

 in a city, not only in the original cost of the books but in the matter 

 of office rent. Convenient for comparison is the year 1880, when the 

 Federal Reporter, the present compilation of current decisions of 

 the inferior federal courts, began. At that time, less than 

 twenty-five years ago, the decisions of the United States Supreme 

 Court could all be purchased in 64 volumes, and the decisions of 

 the lower federal courts up to the same date, both reported and 

 unreported, have since been collected in a series of 30 volumes. 

 But the decisions of the United States Supreme Court since that 

 date fill 94 volumes, while volume 131 of the Federal Reporter is 

 already well under way. The regular series of reports of the 

 appellate tribunals of New York State and of the old chancery 

 courts prior to the same date were contained in 368 volumes, while 

 since then 272 additional volumes have been already issued. In 

 1880 the regular series of the federal and New York state decis- 

 ions required only seventy-three feet of shelf-room. Now they 

 already fill ninety-five feet additional; and this is exclusive of the 

 various series of unofficial reports of decisions, which partly dupli- 

 cate and partly supplement the series above referred to, and of the 

 various collections made up mainly of the decisions of the courts of 

 first instance, of the cases elsewhere unreported or reported in 

 abbreviated form, and of annotated cases, such as Howard's series 

 in 69 volumes, Abbott's series in 66 volumes, the New York State 

 Reporter in 123 volumes and still continuing, and the so-called 

 Miscellaneous Reports in 43 volumes, a series commencing within 

 the past twelve years and still continuing, this last series being of 

 an official character and inflicted upon us by the state itself. All 

 of these, and others which I have not named, must be continually 

 consulted, and the lawyer is also being confronted continually with 

 decisions cited from daily, weekly, or monthly periodicals, and 

 occasionally with certified copies of opinions altogether unreported. 

 The president of the American Bar Association in 1902, in his 

 annual address to the association, stated that the law reports of the 

 then past year contained 262,000 pages, and estimated that a man 

 by reading 100 pages a day might go through them in eight years; 

 by which time there would be new reports on hand sufficient to 

 occupy him for fifty-six years more. A single tribunal recently 

 established in the state of New York, and sitting in four different 

 sections, the so-called Appellate Division of the Supreme Court, 

 which held its first session in the month of January, 1896, has 

 already published 95 volumes of officially reported decisions, besides 

 writing a large number of opinions which are to be found in un- 



