occasion. The process has gone on during the last fifty years
with ever-increasing rapidity, and for two reasons. There have
been more novel questions to meet and there has been a greater
wealth of suggestion and precedent at command.

Not a little, however, of the development of our unwritten law
has been and remains of a local character. This is particularly
true of that of the Pacific States, both on account of climatic
conditions and historical antecedents.[Footnote: Katz _v._
Walkinshaw, 141 California Reports, 116.] Chief Justice Field of
the Supreme Court of California, afterward so long a member of
the Supreme Court of the United States, did both a constructive
and a destructive work in shaping the jurisprudence of that
State. He found it seated in a land on which certain
institutions of civil law origin had been impressed for centuries
and into which other institutions of common law origin had been
introduced in recent years. His judicial opinions molded these
into one mass, rejecting something from each and retaining
something from each.[Footnote: Pomeroy, "Some Account of the Work
of Stephen J. Field," 38, 45.] Some of the results of his
creative touch have been the foundation of decisions in distant
States, but most were so dependent on local circumstances and
conditions as to be incapable of transplantation.

But as to all questions of general concern which can be answered
from analogies drawn from the common law, the judges of each
State--and it is the State judiciary on which the burden of
developing unwritten law mainly rests--now find in the reported
decisions of the courts of last resort in all the other States a
fertile source of supply when they are looking for a rule to fit