American courts to keep their common law in harmony with that of
the other States is often sufficient to induce the abandonment of
a doctrine once distinctly asserted.[Footnote: City of South Bend
_v._ Turner, 156 Indiana Reports, 418; 60 Northeastern
Reporter, 271.] The consistency of American law as a whole is
immeasurably more important than the consistency of the law of
any single State.

Sometimes a court of last resort treats a doctrine which it had
formerly asserted as manifestly unsound and abandons it without
stopping to give a reason or even to overrule the decision which
first announced it.

Illinois for a long generation adopted the rule that if an injury
occurred to one man through the concurring negligence of himself
and another, but his negligence was slighter than that of the
other, he might hold the latter responsible for the damages
suffered.[Footnote: Andrews, "American Law," 255, 1027.] It was
not a doctrine justified by the common law nor generally held in
this country, and in 1894 the Supreme Court of the State refused
to recognize it, with little or nothing more than this brief
_ipse dixit_: "The doctrine of comparative negligence is no
longer the law of this court."[Footnote: Lanark _v._
Dougherty, 153 Illinois Reports, 163; 38 Northeastern Reporter,
892.]

Occasionally a case is overruled because it has been forgotten.

An early decision in Massachusetts (Loomis _v._
Newhall[Footnote: 15 Pickering's Reports, 159.]) had affirmed the