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
As to indexing we should urge upon State legislatures, secretaries
of State, and official draftsmen (when we get any) that the very
excellent system contained in the New York Year Book of Legislation
should be adopted for all volumes of State laws. It is as bad for the
index to be too big as to be too little, and it does not follow that
the good draftsman is a good indexer. The index to our Revised Laws
of Massachusetts is contained in one large separate volume of 570
double-column pages. To look for a statute in the index is just about
as bad as to look for it in the revision itself. The most important
point of all is the proper choice of subject titles. Laws should
be indexed under the general subject or branch of the science of
jurisprudence, or the subject-matter to which they belong, not too
technically and not too much according to mere logic. For example, any
lawyer or any student of civics who wished to learn about the labor
laws of a State, whether, for instance, it had a nine-hour law or not,
would look in the index under the head of "Labor." _Labor_ has become,
for all our minds, the general head under which that great and
important mass of legislation concerning the relation of all employers
and employees, and the condition and treatment of mechanical or other
labor, naturally falls. But if you search in our elaborate index of
Massachusetts for the head of "_Labor_" you will not find it. If you
look under "_Employment of Labor_" you will find it, but you cannot be
certain that you will find all of it, and you will find it under so
many heads that it would take you quite ten or fifteen minutes to read
through and find out whether there is an "hours-of-labor" law or not.
On the other hand, purely technical matters, such as "_Abatement_" are
usually well indexed, because their names are what we call "terms of
art," under which any lawyer would look.
But, after all, it does not so much matter what system we adopt as
long as it is the same system. At present I know of nothing better
than the forty heads contained in the "Principal Headings" of the New
York State Library Index, though I should like to change the names of
a few. For instance, "Combinations or Monopolies" is not the head to
which the lawyer would naturally look for statutes against Trusts. The
word "trust" has become a term of art. If not put under "Trusts" it
should be under "Restraint of trade" or "Monopolies," but the word
"combination" is neither old nor new, legal nor popular. A combination
is lawful. If unlawful, it is _not_ a combination, but a conspiracy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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