644 PRIVATE LAW 



official reports; and, as it is the highest tribunal in the state after 

 the Court of Appeals, no lawyer pretending to any degree of effi- 

 ciency in his office organization can afford to be without them. At 

 the rate of progress which was kept up during the past year, volume 

 500 of these reports will be reached in the year 1941. By that year 

 at latest the lawyer will see volume 329 of the present series of 

 reports of the highest court of New York, volume 381 of those of 

 the Supreme Court of the United States, and volume 431 of the 

 reports of the lower federal courts; and other states will go the 

 same way, in varying degree. When that day shall come, will 

 human wealth and human patience be able to bear the burden 

 longer? 



Up to the present sime the natural effects of this tropical torrent 

 have been mitigated by the increased efficiency of the digester, but 

 his work also is now voluminous. An anuual digest of English 

 and American decisions is now published. Those of the last year 

 occupy, though in the briefest abstract, nearly 5000 double column 

 pages. 



The first obvious consequence of this unintermittent flow of 

 reported opinions is that to handle a case properly, according to 

 the ideas of the people who established the fame of judge-made 

 law, requires each year a greater amount of time than it required 

 before. Every additional opinion that bears or may possibly bear 

 upon the case at bar must be read; and to read it involves the 

 expenditure of an appreciable amount of time. The argument and 

 decision of any still unsettled question, or question claimed to be 

 unsettled, thus involves an enormously greater expenditure of time 

 at four different points --in the preliminary preparation by counsel, 

 in the oral argument, in the court's subsequent examination of the 

 previous authorities preliminary to the decision, and in their discus- 

 sion (when, as often, they are discussed) in the opinion which is 

 subsequently formulated, so as to serve as future evidence of the 

 law. 



Now, on the contrary, instead of expending more time, all parties 

 expend less. The preliminary examination of the authorities, when 

 the case is in the hands of leading and distinguished counsel, cannot 

 be done by them personally. If they had to do it, they could no 

 longer accept enough business to support their families. As a 

 general rule, even in cases of great pecuniary importance, they can 

 carefully examine only a small proportion of the authorities, and 

 must rely upon information derived from their law clerks or junior 

 counsel in selecting what to read. In other cases they may not be 

 able to read any authorities at all, nor to do any independent think- 

 ing, but take reason and precedent alike at second hand from 

 others. 



