Odger's English Common Law

TEXT- BOOKS. 65
same hackneyed extracts from the same judgments ; he should
make some effort to give the net result of the authorities,
and to re-state the law in a clear and original canon. But
even where this is done the text-book is not an authority ; it
cannot be cited to the Court as at all conclusive on the
question; it cannot strictly be cited to the Court at all, so
long as the author is alive.
Any practitioner, who has acquired dexterity in the use of
text-books, indexes and digests, will however soon have before
him some ten or twelve reported cases, which bear more or
less remotely on the question at issue. If these all agree,
his task is light ; but this they seldom do. And even if the
cases there before him appear to be all in his favour, still
there are in the library of his Inn at least two thousand other
volumes of reports, in any one of which may lurk a dictum
or a decision disastrous to his case. These his energetic
opponent is at the very moment industriously searching out
and on the day of trial both series of decisions, pro and con.,
will be paraded before the judge and discussed in the argu-
ments of counsel and in the judgment of the Court.
It is in these reported decisions of the Courts, and in them
only, that we find the principles of our law applied to the
actual facts of everyday life—to facts, that is, differing
widely in their nature, and occurring in an endless variety of
novel combinations. Judicial decisions, indeed, afford the
best, and oftentimes the only, evidence of what our unwritten
law is ; and, in arriving at these decisions, the judges are
guided by established precedents and by the general prin-
ciples of the law, of which such decided cases are only illus-
trations. When the decisions on any point appear to be in
conflict, it is the duty of the judge, whenever the case before
him requires it, to ascertain from the decisions themselves
the general principle which underlies them all, and to state
it clearly as a rule of law for the benefit of the public, who
are entitled to know what is the law under which they live.
When once a clear rule of law is thus ascertained and
enunciated, it becomes a precedent which must be followed
in all subsequent decisions ; there must be uniformity in the
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