Sadly, it is not news that our government of laws is failing. Our legal methods of making and applying law work poorly, when they work at all. Years ago, our long-time benefactor and colleague, the late Professor Ernst C. Stiefel had the answer: we need to civilize our system. We need to learn from civil law methods. This talk will identify about ten ways we could use civil law methods to work toward a government of laws.

James Maxeiner teaches at the University of Baltimore School of Law. He has been a member of the AFLA for more than thirty-five years. In the 1980s he edited the AFLA Newsletter. After two decades in practice, he turned to academics, where his field of research is comparative legal methods. Among several books and many articles on that topic, his newest book is Failures of American Methods of Lawmaking in Historical and Comparative Perspectives, published by Cambridge University Press last year in hard-cover and electronic editions and to appear this year in paperback.