Nashville Union And American

Who Reads Law?--According to the Providence Journal, but two copies of the Revised Statutes of Rhode Island found a sale in the mercantile community of that, the principal city of the State, though the volume was offered at nearly every store and counting room in the place. We doubt if the proportion of Nashville merchants who purchase the volume of acts passed by each session of our Legislature, be not still smaller. There is probably not a volume sold in the whole State outside of the legal profession. Who reads law? the Journal may well ask. Who, outside of the bar, says the New York Evening Post, knows either those well-established principles which protect and define his rights, or the character of the modifications in the law which the Legislature makes from time to time? Little as business men know of literature and science, they are more conversant therewith, it is safe to say, than with that which enters into their daily transactions and eventually decides upon their validity. Hence a vast deal more litigation than need be; hence the constant recurrence of cases, involving questions which were settled scores of years ago.

Without endorsing the popular fallacy that every man be his own lawyer, or that there is no necessity for the legal profession in communities wherein the most complicated problems are constantly demanding solution, we cannot agree that a little learning of this description is a dangerous thing. It is useful to every man to know to what obligations his ordinary contracts commit him, and to have some notion of the force of language and the nature of the law whereby it is to be interpreted. A few minutes a day spent attentively over an ordinary text-book, a careful perusal of the two or three statutes in each volume which affect a man personally, would be time and labor well invested, especially for merchants.