By Laws 1903 c. 372 the Supreme Court was authorized to select a person to prepare a digest of all of its decisions. In December, 1903, I was selected by the Court and this digest is the result. The act authorizing the digest provided that it should be prepared "in such manner as the Supreme Court shall direct." The Court gave me a free hand except that it directed me to follow substantially the so-called American Digest Classification. Into the main titles of this classification I have added the following: Conflict of Laws, Duress, Election, Equitable Conversion, Foreign Laws, Implied or Quasi Contracts, Incompetence, Interstate Commerce, Laches, Maxims, Merger, Mistake, Municipal Courts, Photographers, Probate Court, Recording Act, Relation, Restraint of Trade, Roads, Service of Notices and Papers, Stare Decisis, Stay of Proceedings, Supreme Court, Trade Secrets, Undue Influence, Unfair Competition, Wagers, and Waiver. So far as possible cases relating to "errors" have been placed under Evidence, Trial, New Trial, and other specific titles, rather than under Appeal and Error. Any classification is more or less arbitrary. Custom is a better guide than logic or the ideas of the individual digester. The law is more result of experience than of logic or a rigid application of general principles, and one result of this fact is the absence of any logical or philosophical classification. The common-law forms of action have been abolished, but they still largely determine the classification and terminology of our law. Cases involving statutory law have been digested with reference to the sections of Revised Laws 1905, so far as possible. In the third volume will be found a table showing the sections of the text where the cases relating to the sections of the Revised Laws of 1905 are digested. My aim has been to emphasize the general rules of the law rather than the facts of particular cases. Unimportant decisions, especially those relating to pleading, the admissibility and sufficiency of evidence, and obsolete statutes, have been relegated to the notes and treated summarily, not only to save space but also to prevent general rules from being submerged in a mass of details. This digest includes all the cases reported in the first 109 volumes of the Minnesota Reports, and, so far as possible, the more important cases of the April, 1910, term, reported in the Northwestern Reporter while the digest was passing through the press. It is my present intention to issue frequent cumulative supplements to this digest.

Mark B. Dunnell