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A WRITER who, at the present day, should venture to offer

any remarks of a general nature on English Law might well be asked to show his credentials. It may, accordingly, be mentioned, that the writer of these articles has, during the past thirteen years, been engaged, in happy conjunction with four of his former colleagues of the Oxford Law School, in a thorough and systematic examination of the whole body of the civil law of Englandi. e., the law governing the relations of English citizens with one another. Further, not only have he and they searched the evidence, but they have bound themselves to state the result in its most compact and logical form a task which has involved the keenest and most thorough discussion of disputed points, and an elaborate winnowing of the chaff from the grain. And, whilst it would be claiming too much to allege that each one of the 2200 and odd paragraphs of the Digest of English Civil Law1 represents the individual opinion of all the five authors of that work (such a claim would, in effect, be its own condemnation), it is true

* Author's rights in all countries expressly reserved.

1 DIGEST OF ENGLISH CIVIL LAW. By Edward Jenks (editor), W. M. Geldart, W. S. Holdsworth, R. W. Lee, and J. C. Miles. (Boston, U. S. A.; Boston Book Co., London (England); Butterworth & Co. 1905-16.) Referred to in these pages as the 'DIGEST.'

to say, that no one of these paragraphs has appeared in print without being subject to the scrutiny of at least three critics, whose criticism was none the less keen that it was entirely friendly. At least the writer of these pages, upon whom, as editor of the work, the shafts of criticism most fiercely fell, will hardly forget, whilst life lasts, the long arguments, sometimes prolonged almost to the point of physical exhaustion, which heralded the birth of some of the most contentious paragraphs of the Digest.

The writer and his colleagues would fain hope that this work, though it cannot claim the full tale of Fortescue's viginti annorum lucubrationes, may be of some use to the students and practitioners of English Law, and fill an unique, if modest, niche in the temple of legal literature. At any rate, it seems not unfair to claim that its editor, under whose hands the image slowly grew, must have made some close acquaintance with the materials of which it is carved.

The very fact that such a task has been accomplished, even with moderate success,2 would seem to be in itself of some importance as a refutation of the obscurantist theory, at one time widely prevalent, that English Law (or at least much of it) is incapable of being stated in the form of simple rules or principles. The advocates of this view would appear to have been blind to the grave imputation which it cast upon a system which they profess to admire; but it is not improbable that their attitude, in so far as it was not the result of mere conservative prejudice, was due to an imperfect apprehension of the difference between a Digest and a Code. The terms are, no doubt, used inconsistently by jurists; but, whatever the terms used, there is a clear distinction between a Code which professes to provide for all possible cases, and a Digest which merely professes to state in orderly form authoritative rules of law. That English Law is yet ripe, or ever will be, for codification in the sense above defined, may well be doubted; certainly the writer is not prepared to discuss here the wisdom of proposals for codification. But, as the success of the Sale of Goods Act, the Bills of Exchange

The authors of the DIGEST may fairly pride themselves upon the fact that, in the eleven years during which the work has been in the press, no mistake of any importance has been discovered in the text. One or two omissions have been detected; and a certain number of changes in the law have been made while the work has been in progress. These have been duly noted in the Errata and Corrigenda of later volumes, and will be incorporated into the reissue of the completed work.

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