422 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. success which have characterized the Law School within the last twenty- five years. As an example of graceful and felicitous introduction, the closing paragraph of Hon. J. C. Carter's address, introducing Professor Langdell, has been rarely surpassed. The Roman and the Common Law. — The address delivered by Judge William Wirt Howe, of New Orleans, before the American Bar Association last summer has recently been reprinted in pamphlet form. He outlines in a very attractive manner the several ways in which the Roman law has exercised an influence on our law, wisely saying little about Roman Britain and much .about Anglo-Norman ecclesiastics. Students of Germanic legal history will perhaps find him too generous to Rome when he comes to an enumeration of some institutions and doctrines of ours which show civilian influence. The use of the fine, for instance, in conveying land, can scarcely be connected with the in jure cessio of the older Roman lawyers. The in jure cessio was a collusive suit which ended with a recovery by judgment, and not with a "fine," or compromise {concordia finalis). Furthermore, the Roman device did not preclude the claims of third parties. On the other hand, the use of collusive suits to convey land was known to the courts of the Frankish Empire, and the gerichtliche Aiijlassung which developed from the Frankish practice was the most important, possibly the sole, mode of conveying land in Germany during the later Middle Ages. The procedure is substantially that of the English fine, and the one whom the court puts in possession is protected after a year and a day by the court's ban. There would seem to be no reason to look beyond the Germanic systems of law for the origin of the fine. (See Pollock and Maitland, Hist, of E?tg. Z,a7ei, vol. ii., pp. 94, 95.) The same may be said of many another English practice or rule of law. The accident of resemblance, and in some cases the partially Romanized terminology of our law, have more than once led writers to give undue credit to Rome. Report of Commissioners of Code Revision in New York. — On the nth of December, the Commissioners appointed by Governor Morton last June to study codes of procedure in operation outside of New York, and submit propositions as to the best means of revising, condensing, and simplifying the present New York Code, reported to the Legislature the result of their six months' work. Six months has proved too short to allow a full performance of the duties imposed upon the Commission. Accord- ingly the Commissioners make no attempt to suggest in detail the features of the new code : nor have they found it practicable in the limited time to make a comparative study of the various State and foreign procedure codes. Such an examination of other codes and specific propositions for a revised New York Code are to be reported a year hence. The first part of the present report deals with civil procedure in an- cient countries, including in its range systems of procedure as widely separated, geographically at least, as those of ancient Ireland, Greece, Persia, and Hindustan. The second part contains a list of modern states and countries, with an enumeration in case of each, of the codes, statutes, and other sources of information regarding the procedure in
