Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/385

359 LORD BOWEN'S JUDICIAL CHARACTERISTICS, 359 supreme test of intellectual capacity, Lord Bowen has few superiors. Law, to him, was not a mere collection of rules. As he said in one case, " There is no magic at all in formalities." ^ He recognized, to use his own language, the duty of endeavoring to apply legal doc- trines so as to meet " the broadening wants or requirements of a growing country, and the gradual illumination of the public con- science." When he cited authorities, it was only to support conclu- sions which he had already reached by the independent exercise of his judgment. He had no patience with the servile citation of cases to define general terms, which are necessarily relative, and which if finally defined would lose half their efficiency .^ In dismissing summarily a needless action he said : — collected around this particular point. The law has been clear for fifty years, and all the cases that have been reported since that time are merely illustrations of the way in which the court applies the principle." ^ No better example of the triumph of reason and justice over technicalities can be found in the reports than Lord Bowen's opin- ion in Ratclifife v. Evans.* In that case he extracts the spirit from the technical rule, and applies it with unerring precision, to the discomfiture of the counsel who raised it. In speaking of applying in modern times the ancient rule as to contracts in restraint of trade, he said, in Maxim Nordenfelt Gun & Ammunition Co. v. Nordenfelt: ^ — " A covenant in restraint, made by such a person as the defendant with a company he really assists in creating to take over his trade, differs widely from the covenant made in the days of Queen Elizabeth by the traders and merchants of the then English towns and country places. When we turn from the homely usages out of which the doctrine of Mitchell V, Reynolds, i R Wms. i8i, sprang, to the central trade of the few great undertakings which supply war material to the executives of the world, we appear to pass to a different atmosphere from that of Mitchell V. Reynolds. To apply to such transactions at the present time the rule that was invented centuries ago in order to discourage the oppres- sion of English traders and to prevent monopolies in this country, seems to be the bringing into play of an old-fashioned instrument. In regard, 1 Miles V. New Zealand Co., 32 Ch. D. 289. 2 In re Young & Harston's Contract, 31 Ch. D. 174 ; Ex parte Griffith, 23 Ch. D. 74.
 * I regret that we have to add one more to the cloud of cases which are
 * Green v. Humphrey, 26 Ch. D. 479.
 * [1892] 2 Q. B. 529. 6 [1893] I Ch. 631.