The principal outcome of their efforts was the establishment in 1892 of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State laws. This conference is composed of delegates appointed by the governors of the several States, usually under State acts authorizing the appointment. As its name indicates, its object is to draft statutes which it recommends to the State legislatures for adoption. In 1925 the conference had drafted during the 33 years of its existence 34 acts. Many of these acts which deal with commercial subjects have been widely adopted not only by the States but by Alaska and the island possessions of the United States—the Negotiable Instruments Act by 54 jurisdictions; the Warehouse Receipt Act by 48; the Bills of Lading Act by 26. The experience of the conference would seem to show that it takes from 20 to 25 years from the adoption of a uniform commercial act by the conference before it is generally adopted in all the more important States. The conference is not confining its activities to the preparation of commercial acts. Its Desertion and Non-Support Act has been adopted in 21 States. On the other hand, its draft act relative to judicial procedure in divorce and its draft acts dealing with social legislation have met with little acceptation, though many of the provisions of such an act as the Child Labour Act have been incorporated into subsequently adopted State statutes on the subject.
The Clarification and Simplification of the Common Law.—Perhaps the most important of the legal institutions which the United States owes to England is the common law system of expressing and developing law. The fundamental feature of the system is the general judicial recognition that a decision of a court in one case has a degree of binding force when later a case arises which presents similar or analogous facts. The common law is the law developed and expressed by judicial decisions. As a whole the decisions of the English and American courts form one of the two great systems of law in force in the world to-day, the Roman law, the ultimate principal source of the codes of con tinental Europe and Central and South America, being the other.
The characteristic difference between a principle of law foun ded on decisions of the courts and a principle expressed in a statute is that the former, or common law principle, is never absolutely binding on a court. The power that makes can always modify if the strict application of the prior rule to the instant case would, in the opinion of the court, produce injustice. The common law, therefore, has a flexibility which the law of statutes and codes does not possess. This flexibility often prevents injustice. Sys tems of law, however, like human beings, have the defects of their qualities. There is an element of uncertainty in the common law from which law expressed in properly drawn statutes is free. This uncertainty has not often proved a serious defect when the law is expressed and developed by one court or group of courts or ganized in a unified system. But in the United States with 48 separate State jurisdictions and a large number of Federal courts distinct from the State courts, the conflict between the decisions in different States and between the States and the Federal courts, as well as the uncertainty as to the law in any one State, produces the most unfortunate consequences.
The reported decisions in the United States already number (1928) approximately 800,000 cases recorded in about 11,200 vols., and to this mass there is being added annually some 153,000 printed pages. To this accumulation of American precedent must be added the decisions of the English courts and the courts of other parts of the British empire in pari materiel, any one of which may be cited as persuasive authority in an appropriate case. It has become manifest that the whole common-law system threatens to fall through the accumulation of an undigestible amount of authority.