Cornell Law Review Volume 38 Article 1 Issue 4 Summer 1953 Medieval Origins of Modern Law Reporting Frank Pegues Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Frank Pegues, Medieval Origins of Modern Law Reporting , 38 Cornell L. Rev. 491 (1953) Available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/clr/vol38/iss4/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Law Review by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CORNELL LAW QUARTERLY VoLumE 38 SummR, 1953 NumBER 4 THE MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF MODERN LAW REPORTING Frank Pegues* American lawyers and law students of today are indebted, perhaps unwittingly, to an unknown group of men who lived in the last decades of the thirteenth century. For it was some seven hundred years ago that the first law reports appeared for the use of Bench and Bar in what was then a rapidly developing system of English common law. Although the first reports were compiled exclusively for the training of the pro- fession, they assumed an added and vital importance within two centuries when the common law itself took on the aspects of a system of case law, and law reports, in such a system, were and still are indispensable. As a result of this unique development, the shelves of law libraries, today in the mid-twentieth century, are filled with varieties of modern law reports-and with reports which are not so modern.