eral Term, when the judgment of the Special Term was affirmed; and the plaintiffs have appealed to this court. The petition substantially sets forth that the plaintiffs being the owners of five barges of ice, on the upper Mississippi river, consigned the same to Scherholz & Klinesmith, of the city of St. Louis, to be sold by them on commission; that the plaintiffs ordered the consignees to have the ice insured, and that the consignees undertook the agency, and agreed to have the ice insured for plaintiffs. Instead of insuring the ice in the names of the plaintiffs, they made the insurance in their own names, to indemnify themselves, in case of loss, as they would be liable for such loss, having disobeyed the instructions of their principals in not procuring insurance in their names. One of the barges of ice was lost by a peril provided against, and the consignees assigned the policy to plaintiffs; and this suit was brought by them, as assignees, for the value of the lost cargo. The alleged ground of demurrer was, that the consignees had no insurable interest in the ice. A consignee, as such, has no insurable interest in goods consigned to him for sale on commission, unless it be to the extent of the commissions or profits he expects to derive from such sales. This he has the right to insure, regardless of any instructions from the consignor. But if he accepts a consignment, with instructions from his principals to insure for their benefit, it becomes his duty to insure; and if he neglects to do so, and a loss occurs, he is liable to them for the amount. The consignees, in the case under consideration, instead of taking out a new policy in the names of their principals, had the risk entered on their own policy in their own names, as a convenient mode of indemnifying themselves against such damages as they might suffer in not insuring in the names of their principals. I think they had the right to this to protect themselves, and to this end they ought to be considered as interested to the full value of the ice. See Bartlett et al. vs. Walter, 13 Mass. R., 297; Oliver vs. Green, 3 Mass. R., 133; Hukirru vs. Keil, 27 N. Y., 163. After being ordered to insure, the consignees might have considered themselves trustees for the consignors, and insured in their own names for them. My impression is, that in such case the "positive stipulation of the underwriter to pay the loss to the agent, would never be rendered void by the liability of the party really assured to sustain an action. on the policy in his own name," See 2 Duer. on Ins., Sec. 6, p. 7. In such case the policy ought to inure to the benefit of the principal, and the agent or consignee be treated as a trustee of an express trust, and the amount of recovery would go to his principal. But whether he is a trustee of an express trust or not, he is nevertheless a trustee for the consignor; and in a suit upon the policy, in the name of the consignee, this may be shown in order to show that he had an insurable interest as trustee for his consignor. The demurrer in this case ought to have been overruled. The other Judges concur. Condition of Our Municipal Law. [From the Harrisburg Legal Opinion.] At a recent meeting of the committee on jurisprudence of the Social Science Association, a paper was read by Hon. Emery Washburn, of the Harvard Law School, upon the vast and constantly increasing accumulation of statutes and decisions. "The Law of Massachusetts, for example, must be sought in one huge volume of statutes, and ten lesser volumes of Legislative enactments, and one hundred and three volumes of reports though the first of those volumes dates back only as early as 1805. And every year adds a new supplementary volume of legislation, together with two more volumes of decided cases, of all of which the citizen, through himself or his paid counsellor, must know something more or less minutely accurate, in order to come within the legal assumption that no man is ignorant of the law. The law, in this respect, is inexorable in its requirements, and excuses no man for the unpardonable guilt of not knowing what it is. But when we go beyond the borders of our own State, and look for the light of analogy, in understanding our law, to the decided cases of our sister States, we find they number almost two thousand volumes, without including the volumes containing their statutes. Ours is getting to be the experience of the Roman courts, and lawyers in the massiveness of the materials out of which one is to hunt up and gather the law upon any of the thousand questions which are daily arising in a busy, active, thinking and reasoning community. And the time is approaching, if it has not yet arrived, when the country will have to resort to some such measures of relief as the Romans were driven to by the exigencies in which they found themselves by reason of the multiplication of their laws. In the year 131, A. D., Selvius Julianus, under the direction of Emperor Hadrian, collated the edicts which had been promulgated by the prætors and magistrates from time to time, and embodied them into a single and complete edict, to which the name "Perpetual" was given. This was approved by the Senate, and, as far as it went, became the standard of what the law then was. This was, in effect, collecting and arranging in an orderly manner the rules and principles upon which the former prætors VOL. I.-NO. III.-13. had professed to administer justice during the year for which they had been successively chosen, and giving to them the sanction of the Senate as a perpetual law. The Institutes and Commentaries of Gaius, a renowned lawyer of that day, soon followed, going far toward supplying a summary treatise upon the Roman law. Between that and the great work of Justinian, which appeared about the middle of the sixth century of the Christian era, there had been several attempts to codify the Roman law, with more or less success. But even after all, when the scheme was finally undertaken in earnest, which resulted in the Code, Digest and Institutes of Justinian, the laws to be thereby embodied had been the growth of a thousand years, and filled many thousand volumes-so many that nobody could buy or read them. This seems to be an epitome of the juridical history of every civilized country. While, therefore, in view of the vast mass of the material of which our law is composed, with the constantly accumulating volumes of legislation and judicial decisions, every one is beginning to feel more sensibly the necessity of doing something to remedy the evil, the inquiry comes back how it can be done? For the reasons already stated, the answer can hardly be other than that relief must be sought in something like a code. Fourteen of the States now have codifying commissions at work on their laws. On the other hand, a complete code may be set down as an impossibility, under such a system of legislation as ours. In New York it is near twenty years since able commissioners reported five several codes under the authority of the legislature, not one of which has been acted upon. An able commissioner appointed to frame a code of criminal law for the Commonwealth, which is a matter, one would suppose, of primary necessity, reported such a code in 1844, twenty-seven years ago, but the legislature has never found time to take it up to be acted upon, and it is now all but forgotten; and yet that something of immense advantage--if not all that is desired-may be done in the direction of a code may be easily shown. Every revision of our statutes has been a step in that direction. Our code of practice, such as it is, is an approximation to a code upon a particular subject of the law, for what the profession had before depended chiefly upon the common law. But there is enough in these to suggest a hint of what may be done in the process of time, if the legislature will take hold of the work in earnest. Let them put the work into single hands, a single subject to each individual-not the whole body of the law at once, but some of the most practically important departments of it, or, what, perhaps, would be wiser, select some one subject, like that of mortgages, or insurance, or wills and administration, and commit it to some competent and experienced lawyer, to be selected for his fitness for the work, irrespective of his political biases or associations, and commission him to state in a condensed, orderly, intelligible form the law upon that subject, so far as it has been declared by statute or adjudicated by the court. Let him report this to the legislature in the form of an act, and then let it be submitted to a proper committee and opened to public censure and comment; and, when perfected, let it be passed upon by the legislature and declared to be the law. If it did no more, it would be "posting up," as it were, the law on that subject to the date of its enactment in an institutional form, and serve for a new starting point, behind which courts and lawyers would not have to go to find out what the law then was. If this can be done with success, with one or two subjects in a year, it would not be long before, upon all the most important matters of practical interest, the public would have an authoritative statement and exposition; and thus the advantages of a code would be gained, without any sudden derangement of the order of things by substituting an entire code at once for the form in which the law has hitherto been accessible. "If it is said this contemplates confiding too much to the learning, good sense and capacity of one man, it may be answered that if three or five men engage in it as a commission to do the original work, there is quite sure to arise embarrassments from a diversity of opinions between them, or the whole will be directed and controlled by the influence of a stronger will or a superior capacity on the part of some one of the commission, whereby numbers become a hindrance or a clog rather than a help in accomplishing the work. And we are borne out in recommending a single commissioner by what we know, historically, of the mode in which the most successful and famous codes in the world have been prepared. The Institutes of Justinian, though drawn up by a commission of three, are founded almost wholly upon the Institutes of Gaius, a private writer, while we have authority for asserting that the commission of five who framed the Code Napoleon, borrowed more than three-quarters of this code of France by "literal extracts from the works of Pothier." And though we may not have in our profession men whose services could be commanded who could pretend to a scope and accuracy of learning like |