Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

DOI

http://doi.org/10.12946/rg24/341-343

Abstract

At the opening of the first Nevada legislature in 1861, Territorial Governor James W. Nye, a former New York lawyer, warned the assembly that it had the burden to erect a functioning government within a short legislative session. »Happily for us, a neighboring State whose interests are similar to ours, has established a code of laws« that Nye argued could »be made applicable« to Nevada. That neighboring state was California, and the California mining lawyer William Morris Stewart followed Nye’s instructions to the letter. Stewart literally cut and pasted the California Practice Act into the session bill, crossing out state and California and substituting territory and Nevada where necessary. (Figure 1.) Stewart copied not just California’s code but also its method of codification. California too had borrowed its code in a similar if not quite as extensive manner from New York.

Disciplines

Civil Procedure | Law | Legal Writing and Research

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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