642 PRIVATE LAW 



ing them with a rapidity that will soon receive universal recog- 

 nition. 



A change very commonly noticed is that caused by the enormous 

 multiplication of printed reports. At the beginning of the nine- 

 teenth century but an armful of judicial reports had been printed 

 in the English language outside of England itself. For a long 

 time subsequent, the cases of authority upon any given point were 

 still so few that court and counsel could thoroughly familiarize 

 themselves with every one of them, while a really considerable pro- 

 portion of the law likely to come up in court was embodied in cases 

 whose names were commonly known to all members of the profes- 

 sion with any pretensions to learning. About a hundred years ago 

 each of the states of the Union then admitted had begun to produce 

 a series of reports of at least the decisions of its highest court. 

 During the nineteenth century the number of states of the American 

 Union increased from sixteen to forty-five. Reports were also 

 being issued in the territories and in a large number of the British 

 colonies. Some of the individual states of the Union, moreover, 

 as well as England and the United States, were producing reports of 

 their inferior tribunals. 



It is, indeed, not necessary for the practitioner, in order to ascer- 

 tain all the law which is theoretically binding upon his client, to 

 examine any reports outside of those of his own jurisdiction; but 

 it is unsafe for him to stop there unless the statutes or reports in 

 his own jurisdiction are absolutely in point and controlling. Even 

 in England American precedents are continually cited and dis- 

 cussed; and in most of the United States, decisions of England and 

 of other states, as well as those of the federal courts, are given 

 great weight, while those of the British North American provinces 

 are not entirely neglected. In the larger states like New York, as 

 in England, the use of reports outside the jurisdiction is less com- 

 mon; but that is only on account of the enormous multiplication 

 of reported decisions within the jurisdiction, so that to master the 

 home decisions alone upon any given point is a harder task than it 

 was to master all decisions at the time when the glory of judge- 

 made law was at its zenith. Twenty-five years ago it was not 

 unusual for the New York lawyer to keep in his library not only a 

 substantially complete set of the reports of his own state and of 

 the federal courts, but also a large selection from those of England 

 as well as of some of the other American states. The private law 

 library since then has been rapidly contracting in scope, while not 

 diminishing in size. Even the largest offices are driven more and 

 more to depend upon the great public or association libraries for 

 the complete preparation of their work, which means a decrease 

 of efficiency where the libraries are within the lawyer's reach, and 



