The United States, with the exception of Louisiana, originally inherited a common law system in which the law was not organized and restated such that it could be identified as (1) relevant to a particular legal question and (2) currently in force. The process of organizing the law, called codification, was borrowed from the civil law through the efforts of American lawyer David Dudley Field. Field, in turn, was building upon early (but wholly unsuccessful) foundational work by the English legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who actually coined the verb "to codify" for the process of drafting a legal code. The earliest attempt at codification occurred in Massachusetts with a 1648 publication.