Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/73

53 NOTES. 53 V. R. A. Patterson Tobacco Co. (i8 Sup. Ct. Rep. 335) is interesting from both these points of view. A statute of Virginia declares that a carrier who accepts goo<ls for transportation to a point beyond his own route is responsible for them as a common carrier, unless he shall have contracted in writing that beyond the terminus of his own line he is to be responsible only as a forwarding agent. The court holds that such a statute merely lays down a rule of evidence, and does not so infringe the right of the carrier to limit his liability by contract as to amount to a regulation of interstate commerce. The substantial justice of this class of decisions has been recently touched upon. See 1 1 Harvard Law Review, 544. Turning, however, to the other aspect of the question, can it be .said as a matter of principle that the true ratio decidendi is that which is intimated by the court ? It is true that it is commonly said of the clauses in the Statute of Frauds and similar statutes that the requirements laid down by them are those of the law of evidence. It may, perhaps, be questioned whether this is not " obscuring the difference between substance and form ; " and whether it would not possibly be more correct on principle to say that these are simply cases of substantive law, couched sometimes, for the sake of con- venience, in terms of evidence. To draw an illustration from another field of law, it could hardly be maintained that the requirement of a seal for a covenant or of witnesses for a will belongs to the law of evidence. The requirement is simply a rule of substantive law that a document with- out a seal is not a covenant, or without witnesses is not a will. It is readily conceivable that there might be an abundance of probative matter by which the agreement of the parties in the one case, or the desires of the deceased in the other, could be established beyond cavil. The proof might be wholly unobjectionable on any of the laws of evidence ; and yet all this endeavor would be in vain, not because of any law of evidence, but because the law in regard to instruments makes it necessary that a deed should have a seal and a will witnesses, and these documents do not fulfil the requirements. Similarly in the present case ; the real difficulty that the appellant encountered was not that he could not establish what had been agreed upon, but that because of the substantive law of Virginia in regard to carriers the agreement would not do him any good when he had established it ; his trouble is " that he is trying to do something which is legally inadmissible, not that he is trying to do a permissible thing by means of evidence which is objectionable." Restraints on Alienation by Married Women. — The recent case oi Brown v. McGill, 39 Atl. Rep. 613, in the Court of Appeals of Mary- land, affords an excellent test of the principle upon which the law allows restraints on the alienation of a married woman's separate estate. A feme sole in contemplation of marriage settled her own property upon a trustee in trust for herself for lite, for her separate use, without power of anticipation. The court decided that this restraint upon alienation was ineffective, it being against public policy to allow a woman thus to place her own property beyond the reach of those who should subsequently become her creditors. Even when, as in Maryland, spendthrift trusts are tolerated, it is well settled that they will not be allo.ved where the