The last time I saw Professor Dicey was just two years ago, at his home in Oxford. He looked gray, old and broken, feeble and deaf, but he was mentally alert and vigorous. He was engaged with Dr. Keith in this new edition of his Conflict of Laws, and discussed with interest and understanding the changes which the war had wrought in the subject. We talked, too, of the first time I had met him, … and of his visit to my class, and his envy of my fifty students; he never could get together more than half a dozen students for the Conflict of Laws in Oxford. I left him sadly, for I knew that I should look upon his face no more. He lived to finish this edition with Dr. Keith's sympathetic help.

In saying that Dicey on the Conflict of Laws is one of the foremost English legal treatises written in the last century one does only the barest justice; but one must also point out two defects which an English treatise must have, when compared with the outstanding American works of the same sort. In the first place the ‘welter of decisions’ from which we suffer has at least this merit: that it gives the legal author rich store of authority on which to draw.