On the practicability of codifying English law, with a specimen code of the law of evidence

Abstract

There is a very natural desire on the part of the public to have our laws simplified and condensed. It is a legal maxim that everyone is supposed to know the law, and every person is visited with the consequences of his ignorance, and yet those who have spent their lives in the study of it are often obliged to confess their ignorance; and if anyone desires to know what is the law applicable to a particular state of circumstances, he is generally obliged to search through many volumes, and read and consider many decided cases. The written law is to be found at large in the volumes of the statutes, and the unwritten law is not collected in any authoritative form, but is to be looked for amongst the numerous volumes of reports of cases commencing from the very earliest times, and coming down to the present day, and which at present increase at the rate of six or eight volumes yearly. Now the public rebel in feeling against this state of things, and ask why the law cannot be contained in a short code, so that everyone by referring to it could learn what the law is.