The Massachusetts and Connecticut plan, of an _itinerant supreme court_, cannot be commended to imitation. The common arguments, of _bringing justice home to the people_, and _enabling suitors to see in person to their causes_, are not pertinent, where the whole case is contained in the record; where no witnesses are to be summoned or examined--no counsel to be instructed in the cause. Then, the loss of time in travelling, and the want of so extensive a library and so able a bar, as would be formed if the court sat always in one place, must essentially impair the correctness of its decisions, and lower the superiority of its intellect. The common-law of England is made the basis of Massachusetts law, not, as in Virginia, by a legislative declaration that it shall be so, but by adjudications of the courts, recognizing and adopting it as such. By a still bolder stretch, the courts have acknowledged as generally binding, English statutes made in amendment of the common-law--not only before, but _since_ the foundation of the colony: nay, the terms of the decision do not exclude English statutes subsequent to the American revolution. This comprehensive grafting of a foreign code upon the domestic, not by professed and authorised law-givers, but by mere judges, is perhaps one of the most remarkable instances of judicial legislation, any where to be found: and must have arisen from a licentious spirit of _construction_, which, when it acts upon written laws, may naturally be expected to make them mean almost any thing that the interpreters choose.[3] The admirers of an _unwritten law, reposited in the breasts of judges and to be sought only in precedents and decisions_, may vaunt, if they will, its happy _elasticity_, dilating and contracting to fit every conceivable emergency: but I doubt if (among other evils) it does not nurture habits of latitudinous interpretation, destined to be well nigh fatal to one of the great boasts of modern times--written forms of government. Minds accustomed always to make the law adapt itself to the particular occasion; to regard that _as law_, which the immediate case requires; naturally fritter away constitutions with as little ceremony, as children demolish or alter their sand houses and dirt pies.