COLLEGE FOR LAWMAKING.
LAWYERS cannot keep pace with the accretion of our law, still less can laymen,—the one class having to administer, the other to obey The law grows daily more and more beyond the reach of professional comprehension, because the very process of "amending" it is the inverse one, not of extracting principles and positing main results, but of diffusing the law over the whole surface of possible contingencies, including among those contin- gencies all possible interpretations of language. Hence the con- fusion of the law is made greater every year. As no one knows the law, and you might as well try to count the sand as to take into one view the several enactments on one point, it becomes more and more impossible to know how to tit new laws into the mass of the statute-book. Things that are inconsistent with the whole will often be inconsistent with each other. "We have known," says a writer in the Lam Review, "measures hi prepa- ration for different members of the same Government, for which they were all to be responsible, which were in direct opposition to one another ; and we recollect a case where one Minister was abolishing what another contemplated the continued use of, and the first-mentioned kinister had his name on the bill of the lat- ter." While the draughtsmen of bills are absorbed in the im- practicable task of rendering the language of new enactments absolutely certain of interpretation, no corresponding efforts are made in the more useful direction of bringing the extant statutes 1 into a synoptical view, so that lawmakers may know what they are about, and may cease to legislate at random or in conflict A proposal for that purpose appears in the current number of the periodical just cited—hastily and roughly sketched, but full of valuable suggestions. The general scope of the design is this. Most departments of the Government have severally a legal ad. riser, to guide them in matters of law; it is-proposed to bring all those official lawyers together—say at a law library near White. hall—and to intrust to them the duty of drawing bills. The bills thus added in each session to be registered and indexed ; and all existing statutes in like manner to be registered and indexed, so as to bring all enactments of a cognate kind into one view, severally, under the heads of the subject of the statutes, the per sons affected, and the "legislative matter" in divers statutes, to- gether with decisions of law-courts : this registration, indexing, and ultimately consolidation, (if we rightly understand the plan,) to be accomplished by the students in a College. A Board of Revision or Reference on these matters, to consist of the highest officers of the two Houses of Parliament and a few eminent law- yers. Finally, "a Committee of Privy Council for the consider- ation of matters of law and the administration of justice," to sup. ply the Executive Government with more general advice. The writer branches out into some minute and even what will be thought fanciful details,—such as the suggestion that the regis- trars should read the newspapers in order to collect the state- ments of grievances and record them for subsequent treatment : but the idea of bringing together the laws and the working law- makers is of the greatest value ; and it appears to us that the pro- ject is susceptible of being strengthened by still further simpli- fication, fusing its four divisions into two.
The acting lawyers of the Executive and the students engaged in the subsidiary process of making registers, indexes, and di- gests, might well be united in one body, very appropriately termed a College. No form of study is so good as that which consists in actual and effective labour at the work studied under practical guidance and tuition. It is so in all arts. The great painters were workmen under their masters. Medicine is studied best in actual practice. The English naval officer learns his busi- ness at sea. The English barrister derives a valuable part of his study from work done for his master. But as there is no pro- fessor of lawmaking, so there is no clinical study in that part of the business. On the other hand, among the better order of stu- dents there is a degree of zeal and acuteness that would be parti- cularly valuable in such an avocation ; it would both assist and spur on the professors. A college of professors and students de- voted to the study of the law in reference to its actual state as a whole and its yearly accretions, would furnish the most lifesome machinery for the purpose of lawmaking ; and to such a College the work of bill-drawing might well be delegated. It would be easy to do this by sending in draft hills, drawn up to set forth the design of the original author ; the College to convert that draft into a bill—to show the impracticabilities in the draft, or correct it so as to fit existing statutes. No legislative power would be conferred upon the College, but only the duty of making out the draft best suited to accomplish the purpose of the author and to fit in with the rest of the statute-book.
Again, the Board of Revision and the Privy. Council Commit- tee might be fused ; combining in the Committee of Privy Coun- cil to advise the Executive on the special subject of law, its construction, conduct, and application, distinguished persons representing the Executive and both Houses: it would be better if such a Committee did not include servants of the Government burdened with very active duties; since such duties not only take up the time, but unfit the mind for the most deliberate style of consideration. The Committee should be a kind of arbitrator between the present and the permanent. If it is possible to introduce unison, entirety, and order into our system of law and lawmaking, it might be done by such a machinery; but even if the machinery failed to accomplish that desirable object, it would achieve one that would then appear still more desirable : by applying the best possible machinery to the ordering of the present system, without effect, we should bring to a tangible and signal test the impracticability of a system and the falseness of the principle on which it is based ; and then again, the proposed machinery would constitute the best means of effecting a change from the present system to a better, by the facile and not violent means of codification.
We have before suggested that it would be quite possible to combine the advantages of our progressive legislation by bill with the simplicity of codification,—subjecting the code to modification by bills until such modifying enactments should be absorbed into the code at periodical (say decennial) periods; the lawyer's search would then be limited to the statutes of the current decade, and would stop with the last edition of the code. Such a College as that suggested by the Lam Review, under the revision of the Committee of Council, would be the best of machines for pre- paring such codification and keeping the modifying bills in har- mony with it.
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