1. Lord Chief Justice Wilmot, 2 Wils. Rep. 348, 351.
2.Preface to Roile's Abridgement.
3. The number of volumes of English Reports, exclusive of reports relating to the courts of admiralty, elections, settlement cases, and Irish reports, amount at present, it is said, to 364: and to render their contents accessible, the digested indexes of the modern reports amount to 33 volumes. The text books, or treatises; amount to 184 volumes, and the digests and abridgments to 67 volumes making, in the whole, a copious library of 648 volumes, in addition to the statute law. See Humphreys on Real Property, p. 163. To these we may add upwards of 200 volumes of American reports, treatises, and digests.
4. M. Camus annexed to his Letters sur la Procession d'Advocat, a catalogue of select books for a lawyer's library, and which be deemed the most useful to possess and understand; and that catalogue, in the edition of 1772, included near 2,000 volumes, and many of them ponderous folios, and not one of them had any thing to do with the English statute or common law. It is now a complaint in France, that the crowd of reports of decisions encumber the law libraries; and M. Dupin, in his Jurisprudence des Arrets, edit. 1822, alludes to the immensity of such collections, and the great abuses to which that species of jurisprudence is subject.
5. Bacon's Aphorisms, De accummulatione legum nimia, Aph. No. 53-58. De novis digestis legum, Aph. No. 59-64. De scriptoribus authenticis, Aph, No. 78.
6. 16 Johnson, 402.
7. 20 Johnson, 722
8. Jones' Essay on Bailment, p. 46.
9. 33 Hen. VI. 41.
10. Cro. Jac. 527.
11. Aphor. 46. Bacon's Works, vol. 7, 448.
12. Best, Ch. J. 2. Bing, 229.
13. M. Dupin. in his Jurisprudence des Arrets, has given us many excellent rules and observations on the value, and on the abuse of the authority of reports of judicial decisions. He admits the force of them when correctly stated, and applied with discernment and sobriety; and that they have the force of law when there has been a series of uniform decisions on the same point, because they then become conclusive evidence of the law. The immense collection of reports by M. Merlin, in his Repertoire, and especially in his Questions de Droit, he would say, had the stamp of Papinian, if it were permitted to compare any lawyer to Papinian.
14. Entretiens sur les Sciences, et eur la maniere d'etudier.
15. 2 Taunton, 201.
16. Preface to Plowden's Reports.
17. In a recent case in 1 Barnewall & Cresswell, 410, the Court of King's Bench decided a case chiefly upon the authority of a citation from the Year Book of 42 Edw. III; but such a reference is rare.
18. 3 Term, 84.
19. Bacon's Works, vol. 6. p. 122.
20. Lord Bacon's Works, vol. 6. 121, 128, 132, 171.
21. 3 Burr. 1730. 2 Bos. & Pull. 23.
22. Sugden's Letters to a Man of Property, p. 4.
23. 1 Mod. 307.
24. 3 Ch. Cas. 95.
25. Pref. to Jenkins' Centuries.
26. Reeves' History of the English Law, vol. 4. p. 368-377.
27. Bacon's Works, vol. 4. p. 530.
28. 1 Vesey, J. 547. 3 Vesey, 285. 5 Vesey, 664.
29. 3 Anst. 861. 5 Burr. 2629. 1 Merivale, 92.
30. Butler, J. in 6 East, 29. n. Sir J. Mansfield, in 5 Taunton, 64. 4 Vesey, 138. n. Pref. to Eden's Reports. 1 Sch. & Lef. 240.
31. Lord Kenyon, 7 Term, 416.
