T o 0 SPEAK of History and Law is to choose a subject already much investigated. Lord Macmillan in the last decade, Sir Frederick Pollock, F. W. Maitland, Sir William S. Holdsworth and other giants in earlier decades have taken this path. I have no wish to tread where they have cleared the way-for that would merely show with what short steps I walk. It would be possible, were history my metier, to consider what law has meant to history. Herbert Butterfield furnishes an interesting opening in his remark that scientific history in England was begun by John Selden, the celebrated Seventeenth Century lawyer, whom tend to appreciate even more for his civil courage than for his meticulous learning. Leopold Von Ranke in his aphoristic remark that we often ascribe too much to government when the real work of history-making is done from below has suggested a text for a disquisition on what lawyers in their daily professional performances have to offer to the modem school or historians who so rightly regard social and economic features of our common life as being fully the equal of political contests and military engagements in disclosing the history of a people. But inviting as this prospect is, its development must await an abler hand. Another approach would be to consider how lawyers persistently pervert history to serve their own or their clients' interests. How often in courtroom addresses and bar association speeches listen to lawyers praise the jury system as the quintessence of Anglo-Saxon inventiveness in the legal sphere and as the original English contribution to the system of organized justice. Surely they know, as is incontrovertibly proved by the researches of Professor Charles Homer Haskins, that the jury was Norman in origin, and was imported from France after the Battle of Hastings. With what frequency in cases presented to a judge sitting without a jury, lawyers contend that hearsay is admissible evidence, because its exclusion is, as they argue, founded on the theory that juries cannot be trusted to evaluate that type of testimony. Yet Professor Edmund M. Morgan, like others who have delved into the history of the hearsay rule, have made it clear that hearsay is excluded because it cannot be effectively cross-examined and is hence repugnant to the basic premises of our adversary system. On historical principles, exclusion of hearsay is as appropriate in a jury-waived as in a jury case. And what shall I say of what some of my superiors do with the history of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution? Is it that they will not read, or will not learn from the articles which Professor Charles Fairman has written? But, in any case, leaving aside my carping criticism, I shall now proceed directly to the view that I do