re the
Judges collectively for consultation and revision. It seems to your
Committee to be moulded in the essential frame and constitution of
British judicature. Your Committee conceives that the English
jurisprudence has not any other sure foundation, nor, consequently, the
lives and properties of the subject any sure hold, but in the maxims,
rules, and principles, and juridical traditionary line of decisions
contained in the notes taken, and from time to time published, (mostly
under the sanction of the Judges,) called Reports.

In the early periods of the law it appears to your Committee that a
course still better had been pursued, but grounded on the same
principles; and that no other cause than the multiplicity of business
prevented its continuance. "Of ancient time," says Lord Coke, "in cases
of difficulties, either criminal or civil, _the reasons and causes_ of
the judgment were set down _upon the record_, and so continued in the
reigns of Ed. I. and Ed. II., and then there was no need of reports; but
in the reign of Ed. III. (when the law was in its height) the causes and
reasons of judgments, in respect of the multitude of them, are not set
down in the record, but then _the great casuists and reporters of cases_
(certain grave and sad men) published the cases, _and the reasons and
causes of the judgments or resolutions_, which, from the beginning of
the reign of Ed. III. and since, we have in print. But these also,
though of great credit and excellent use in their kind, _yet far
underneath the authority of the Parliament Rolls, reporting the acts,
judgments, and resolutions of that highest court_."[29]

Reports, though of a kind less authentic than the Year Books, to which
Coke alludes, have continued without interruption to the time in which
we live. It is well known that the elementary treatises of law, and the
dogmatical treatises of English jurisprudence, whether they appear under
the names of institutes, digests, or commentaries, do not rest on the
authority of the supreme power, like the books called the Institute,
Digest, Code, and authentic collations in the Roman law. With us
doctrinal books of that description have little or no authority, other
than as they are supported by the adjudged cases and reasons given at
one time or other from the bench; and to these they constantly refer.
This appears in Coke's Institutes, in Comyns's Digest, and in all books
of that nature. To give judgment privately is to