Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statuteStimson, Frederic Jesup
History
Popular Law-making: A study of the origin, history, and present tendencies of law-making by statute
Stimson, Frederic Jesup
Legislation -- United States
Now these systems as we find them are as follows: in nearly all States
public and private laws are lumped together, although in a few they
are indexed separately. Most of the States to-day, including all the
"code" States, adopt the topical system of arrangement, as, indeed,
must be the case in anything that might, by any possibility, be called
a code, and even a general "revision" of the statutes will naturally
fall into chapters covering certain subjects. A few States, as I have
said, cling to the crude alphabetical system, and quite a number have
no discernible system whatever. In some States the annual laws are
arranged by number, in some by date of passage, and in some apparently
according to the sweet will of the printer. In those States which do
not arrange them or entitle them by date of passage we have to depend
on the crude and dangerous system of citation by page. Acts of
Congress are sometimes cited by date of passage, sometimes more
formally by volume and number of the Statutes at Large, and more often
than either, probably, by the popular name of the statute, such as the
"Sherman Act," the "Hepburn Act," or the "Interstate Commerce Law."
It seems to me we should recommend one system. That for the codes or
general revisions should certainly be topical. That of the annual laws
may either be topical or chronological, but the statutes, in whatever
order they are printed, should be _numbered_ and cited by number. No
alphabetical arrangement ever should be permitted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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