of no special training for the work, and who give to it but a
portion of the year.

The modern sense of the value of time, of scientific treatment of
whatever can be treated scientifically, and of uniformity in
scientific methods led toward the close of the nineteenth century
to competition in reporting. Private publishing houses undertook
the prompt publication, in scientific arrangement upon a uniform
plan, of the opinions of the courts. This work began in 1879.
The result has been that the series of official reports of the
Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States has been
discontinued, and that the decisions of all our other appellate
courts are now twice reported. One publishing house has grouped
the States into clusters, issuing for each cluster its own series
of reports, known, respectively, as the Atlantic, the
Northeastern, the Northwestern, the Southeastern, the Southern,
the Southwestern and the Pacific Reporters. The States forming
each group have been selected mainly because they were neighbors
geographically, but partly from commercial reasons. Thus
Massachusetts, which would naturally be assigned to the Atlantic
Reporter, has been put into the Northeastern; and such inland
States as Kansas and Colorado find their place in the Pacific
Reporter. All the reported decisions of all the States in each
group are printed in pamphlet form weekly, as they may be handed
down, in chronological order; and every few months the whole
issued as a bound volume. In this way, for a trifling sum a copy
of any opinion of any American court of last resort can be had in
a few days or weeks after its announcement, and a lawyer's
library can, at slight expense, be furnished with the decisions
not only of his own State but of several others having not unlike