Codicil

“ Our author tells us of a forgery of a codicil by the second wife of the testator: a son by a first wife is cut off, and the farm is left to a son by the second wife. This codicil is in the handwriting of{53} the widow, witnessed by an attorney whose daughter received a handsome legacy, the other witnesses being a clerk and a maidservant. The widow swears that the codicil was drawn at the attorney’s dictation, in the husband’s hearing, and that she was present when it was signed by all the parties. The witnesses gave evidence as to the due execution of the codicil. ”

“ This, though a good deal for the purpose, and helping very far towards self-conviction, yet not seeming wholly of force to establish a command, and being resolved to avoid farther scruple, as well as future occasion for scandal, says he that was the scholar, “I remember to have read in wills of a codicil annexed, which is indeed a part of the will, and what it contains hath equal authority with the rest. Now I have been considering of this same will here before us, and I cannot reckon it to be complete for want of such a codicil. ”

“ Nicholas.
"Exactly," answered Mr. Denny. In his quick, jerky movements he was always very like a bird, but now he was watching the other man with the keen eyes of a hawk.
"Well?" queried the visitor.
"On examination," continued the lawyer, "I found that, unknown to me, he had added a codicil. Pardon me if I make this quite clear for the benefit of our young friend," he continued, turning to Miles. "A codicil is an addition—postscript, as it were—which a person adds to his original will, and it has to be duly signed and witnessed in the same way as the will itself. ”

“ To discover the real wishes and intentions of a testator is often a difficult matter, when, in addition to an already voluminous will, codicil after codicil is added, clause after clause revoked. At a first reading wrong impressions may easily be taken and bitter disappointment caused. ”

“ Bitterworth, received instructions for a codicil, revoking the bequest of the estate to the Massingbirds, and bestowing it absolutely upon Lionel Verner. The bequests to others, legacies, instructions in the former will, were all to stand. It was a somewhat elaborate will; hence Mr. Verner suggested that that will, so far, could still stand, and the necessary alteration be made by a codicil.
“You can have it ready by this evening?” Mr. Verner remarked to the lawyer.
“Before then, if you like, sir. It won’t take me long to draw that up. One’s pen goes glibly when one’s heart’s in the work. ”

“ It is also put here and there in the same Codex (VIII. 18. 7 and XVI. 5. 40) for the "codicil to a will"; but it is used in the singular: the meaning so given to it in the plural, (as in both parts of the Annals) , did not come into vogue till a century after, in the time of Justinian, as may be seen by consulting the Twenty-ninth Chapter of the Pandects which treats of the Law of Codicils ("De Jure Codicillorum") ”

“ The next morning, on opening my safe, I found the unsigned copy of the codicil, and not the signed one.”
“And you believe——?” questioned Duncan.
“That Marjorie Langdon deliberately destroyed the signed codicil and placed the unsigned one in [Pg 156] my safe, hoping the substitution would not be noticed until after my wife’s death.”
“The last is supposition only,” commented Duncan.
“Not so fast,” retorted Admiral Lawrence. “Marjorie was the only one outside our family and the lawyer who knew of the signing of the codicil; it was given to her to place in the safe. ”

“ THE POLYCODICILLIC WILL
“She bequeaths, she repeats, she recalls a donation, And ends by revoking her own revocation; Still scribbling or scratching some new codicil, Oh! success to the woman who makes her own will.” “Ancient, Curious, and Famous Wills.”
In preceding papers examples have been given of wills delayed till the eleventh hour: but to some the making of wills and codicils becomes, at times, a hobby, if not an obsession. “What is a poor woman with no family to do? Affection for nieces must fluctuate.” ”

“ No other testimony is reported in the bill of exceptions. It was contended, on behalf of the plaintiff, that the codicil was not competent as evidence, nor sufficient to transfer property:
1. That the codicil had never been admitted to probate in California, and that the proof of the signatures to the codicil was not sufficient to establish its validity. ”

“ What is decisive on this subject, is, that the first two codicils have no subscribing witness, distinct from the last;-and the name of M'Carty, the witness sworn, is subscribed to the second, or as the defendants contend it should be considered, to the third codicil. ”

“ The final trial came on before the Lord Chief Justice (Cockburn) in 1864, and lasted for eight days. The jury decided against the genuineness of the codicils, mainly upon the characteristics of the writing and spelling.
Both Nuttall and Else were bad spellers, but their mistakes were different. For instance, throughout the will “daughter” was spelt correctly, whereas in the codicil it was “doughter,” and it was proved that Else spelt the word with an “o,” while Nuttall had never done so.
The way in which the “t” was crossed was, however, the most convincing piece of evidence. ”

“ Codex, kō′deks, n. a code: a manuscript volume:—pl. Codices (kod′i-sēz) . [L. codex or caudex, the trunk of a tree, a set of tablets, a book.]
Codger, koj′ėr, n. a mean fellow: an old person: a chap. [Prob. a variant of Cadger.]
Codicil, kod′i-sil, n. a short writing or note added as a supplement to a will.—adj. Codicill′ary. [L. codicillus, dim. of codex.]
Codilla, kō-dil′a, n. the coarsest part of hemp or flax, sorted out and separated from the rest. [Dim. of It. coda—L. cauda, a tail.]
Codille, kō-dil, n. a term at ombre when the player gets fewer tricks than one of his opponents. [Fr.] ”

“ Codification means not the total disappearance of case-law, but merely the reversal of this relation between it and statute law. It means that the substance and body of the law shall be enacted law, and that case-law shall be incidental and supplementary only. In the most carefully prepared of codes subtle ambiguities will come to light, real or apparent inconsistencies will become manifest, and omissions will reveal themselves. No legislative skill can effectually anticipate the complexity and variety of the facts. ”

“ But the law has now been brought into a state of which it may be said that, if it is not the best in all respects that might be desired, it is at least in most respects as good as the conditions of legislation will permit it to be. Codification, in fact, may now be treated purely as a question of form. What is proposed is that the law, being, as we assume, in substance what the nation wishes it to be, should be made as accessible as possible, and as intelligible as possible. These two essential conditions of a sound system of law are, we need hardly say, far from being fulfilled in England. ”

“ It is, however, probable that a general codification now would do harm, and there are strong grounds for contending that Case Law, with its capacity for growth and adaptation to new conditions as they arise and to unforeseen circumstances, is often more convenient and indeed more scientific than a code. Criminal Law, however, at least so far as it relates to indictable offences, ought to be embodied in a definite and complete code, and in the process of codification certain amendments might be made. ”

“ By a codification we understand the reduction of the whole pre-existing body of law to a new form, the re-stating it in a series of propositions, scientifically ordered, which may or may not contain some new substance, but are at any rate new in form. If he had, so to speak, thrown into one furnace all the law contained in the treatises of the jurists and in the imperial ordinances, fused them down, the gold of the one and the silver of the other, and run them out into new moulds, this would have been codification. ”

“ One of the primary purposes for enacting a set of evidentiary rules is to present precise answers to frequently posed questions. "A codification should be so wrought that it supplies answers to a lawyer's questions simpler, more comprehensible, and more easily found than those the lawyer could discover without the codification." ”

“ A copy like codex b, once recognized as belonging to a corrupt family,—once known to contain a depraved exhibition of the Sacred Text,—was more likely by far to remain unused, and so to escape destruction, than a copy highly prized and in daily use.—As for Codex א, it carries on its face its own effectual condemnation; aptly illustrating the precept fiat experimentum in corpore vili. It exhibits the efforts of many generations of men to restore its Text,— (which, ‘as proceeding from the first scribe,’ is admitted by one of its chief admirers to be ‘very rough,748’) —to something like purity. ”

“ A fault frequently found with the Code Civil is that its general divisions show a lack of logic and method, but the division is practically that of the Institutes of Justinian, and is about as good as any other: persons, things, inheritance, contracts and obligations, and finally, in place of actions, which have no importance for French law except from the point of view of procedure, privileges and hypothecs, as in the ancient coutumes of France, and prescription. ”

“ Codification certainly interferes with the so-called organic growth of the law through usage into custom. It is true that a law, once codified, cannot so easily adapt itself to the individual merits of particular cases which come under it. It is further a fact, which cannot be denied, that together with codification there frequently enters into courts of justice and into the area of juridical literature a hair-splitting tendency and an interpretation of the law which often clings more to the letter and the word of the law than to its spirit and its principles. ”

“ No provision was made in either case for incorporating the new law with the code, an omission which Austin justly considers fatal to the usefulness of codification. It is absurd to suppose that any code can remain long without requiring substantial alteration. Cases will arise when its meaning must be extended and modified by judges, and every year will produce its quota of new legislation by the state. ”

“ An ideal code has been contemplated by many law reformers in which every case which could possibly occur should be provided for, and the determination of it be simply effected by reference to the code — a code so universal in its application that no difficulty could be found, but the solution of every legal problem would be at once disclosed. ”

“ To him, his particular code, surrounded by all the sanctions of custom, law, and religion, appears earth-embracing, hell-deep, and heaven-piercing, and any human creature who follows any other code appears fatally wicked, utterly shameless, and ineluctably lost. ”

“ Attempts to fix the immutable part of law, to lay out legal charts for all time, belong to the transition to the maturity of law. The eighteenth-century projects for codification and the era of codification on the Continent, in which the results of two centuries of growth were put in systematic form to serve as the basis of a juristic new start, in form rested upon the theory of natural law. By a sheer effort of reason the jurist could work out a complete system of deductions from the nature of man and formulate [Pg 47] them in a perfect code. ”

“ A single codex could hold the contents of a work which formerly must have been distributed through many volumes in roll-form. The term σωμάτιον, which was one of the names given to a codex, was expressive of its capacity. Turning again to discoveries in Egypt, it appears that in the early centuries the codex-form had become so usual among the Christians in that land that even the native material, papyrus, the recognized material for the roll, was now also made up by them into leaved books. ”

“ And great are the advantages of codification, especially of a codification that embraces a large part of the law. Many controversies are done away with. The science of Law receives a fresh stimulus. A more uniform spirit enters into the law of the country. New conditions and circumstances of life become legally recognised. Mortifying principles and branches are cut off with one stroke. A great deal of fresh and healthy blood is brought into the arteries of the body of the law in its totality. ”

“ In preparing it he consulted C and both Vatican manuscripts, and aimed to retain the reading of the codex whenever possible. He has taken great pains to atone for the copyist's carelessness by indicating for each lacuna the exact number of letters to be supplied. He has also bracketed many conjectures which have crept into the text as glosses, and where he has admitted his own or others' conjectures, he has clearly marked them as such. His text differs in places from the reading of C as shown by the facsimile in Herschel's edition, where he has failed to note the divergence. ”

“ Everywhere, in the countries I have named, laws engraven on tablets and published to the people take the place of usages deposited with the recollection of a privileged oligarchy. It must not for a moment be supposed that the refined considerations now urged in favour of what is called codification had any part or place in the change I have described. The ancient codes were doubtless originally suggested by the discovery and diffusion of the art of writing. It is true that the aristocracies seem to have abused their monopoly of legal knowledge ”