Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/69

49 CLAIMS UNDER ALTERNATE AMBIGUITIES. 49 the property either as appointee of the wife if she survived, or as executor and residuary legatee of the husband if he survived, subject to paying his debts; and these two distinct and incon- sistent rights were held incapable of joinder. To a layman, again, it would seem so natural for Wing to have offered to take the half loaf and pay the husband's debts and legacies in either event out of the property. But in i860 he was not allowed to do so. His two claims could no more be joined in those days than if they had been vested in separate persons. Such a joinder was then con- sidered champertous, contrary to policy, and obnoxious to the statute against buying or selling pretensed titles.^ At the present day the rules of court allow both the joinder of plaintiffs and the joinder of alternative causes of action, so that the difficulty of the ambiguous event might perhaps be got over. But the ambiguous devisee or legatee and the ambiguous devise or legacy are still in a parlous state, and, it may be, receive at times somewhat less than natural justice. The examination student who regards the heir at law with a veneration little short of feudal would probably not waste much sympathy upon such unsubstanti- alities. Hawkins, Jarman, and Theobald supply ready and con- venient answers to all such questions ; and lay criticism is not likely to commend itself to a legal examiner. But the happier student, who has laid aside his straight-waistcoat, and can think a little for himself, might not unprofitably spend an hour or so in satisfactorily exposing the sophistries of that quibbling layman, and relegating him and his mare's-nest to their normal obscurity. G. Rowland Alston. 1 32 Henry VIII., c. 9. Vide Cholmondeley v. Clinton, 2 J. & W. i, 136; Tur. & R. 107, 116; 4 Bligh, I, 43, 81, 90, 123.