Law Commons^™

A Government Of Laws Not Of Precedents 1776-1876: The Google Challenge To Common Law Myth, James Maxeiner

James R Maxeiner

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is a common law country of precedents where, until the 20th century (the “Age of Statutes”), statutes had little role. Digitization by Google and others of previously hard to find legal works of the 19th century challenges this common law myth. At the Centennial in 1876 Americans celebrated that “The great fact in the progress of American jurisprudence … is its tendency towards organic statute law and towards the systematizing of law; in other words, towards written constitutions and codification.” This article tests the claim of the Centennial Writers of 1876 and finds …

Laws Without Order: The Price The U.S. Pays For No Codes, James R. Maxeiner

James R Maxeiner

Codification is a ubiquitous feature of modern legal systems. Codes are hailed as tools for making law more convenient to find and to apply than law found in court precedents or in ordinary statutes. Codes are commonplace in most countries. Most reports and presentations at the Congress deal with how codification is effected and not with whether it is.

The United States is anomalous. It does not have true codes. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many countries adopted systematic civil, criminal and procedural codes, the United States considered, but did not adopt such codes.

Where other reports …