Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 04.pdf/480

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Communications in regard to the contents of the Magazine should be addressed to the Editor. Hokace W. Fuller, 15^ Beacon Street, Boston, Mass. The Editor will be glad to receive contributions of articles of moderate length upon subjects of interest to the profession; also anything in the ■way of legal antiquities or curiosities, facetice, anecdotes, etc. THE GREEN BAG. OUR " Disgusted Layman" has waked up again, and gives vent to his feelings in the follow ing epistle : — Editor " The Green Bag : Sir, — Your "Disgusted Layman" has recently grown a fresh grievance against the common law, and the lawyers who worship it with such singular blindness. Did it never occur to you that the very lawyer who has such a reverence for the common law constantly takes care to provide that the effect of it shall not apply? Just think a bit and see if you cannot recall a case where a lawyer would be scouted as not knowing his business did he not make the plainest provision against the application of this law in drawing papers. Well, after thinking it over, do you give it up? Why, even "A Member of the Bar," much less a lawyer, would be set down as an ignoramus if, in drawing papers of a private partnership, he did not provide that the majority in interest should rule, not the majority in number! Take any dozen business men you may run across, and see what they will say as to a practice or rule in business that every business man provides against? Here a legislature provided in the plainest terms that the common law should not be set up against a certain statute, and did n't the Supreme Court of that State drive a whole caravan over that act? Is n't it time that voter and legislator be allowed to have a "say" as to the laws governing them? The average layman believes the law is a good thing; but if you lawyers don't change your ways, how long will he have any respect for you t Yours truly. A Disgusted Layman.

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LEGAL ANTIQUITIES. The following are methods of capital punish ment used in the German Empire of the Middle Ages : — Hanging between dogs or wolves. An aggrava tion of the death penalty was the hanging of male factors between two dogs or wolves. Jews were thus punished as late as the year 15 11, as appears from the Laienspiegel. Augsburg, 1511, bl. 216. A poet of the thirteenth century recommends this as an appropriate punishment for scolding wives. Execution with the plough. Terminal marks, such as milestones, stones placed in such a manner as to serve to distinguish property, walls and trees, used for the same purpose, were in ancient times deemed sacred. We meet this in the Roman law; and curiously enough, Bracton has copied the passage from the civil law. The law treatises and enactments of mediaeval Germany imposed the most cruel punishments for the desecration of such objects. The offender was buried up to his neck in the ground, and then his head was ploughed offExenterare. This was the punishment of dis embowelling. The reader may modify materially his notions of German culture on reading this passage : " He shall be cut open, then he shall be tied to a post, and dragged around it with his entrails untilnone remain in his body." Emmerich. Frankenb. Recht. (Schminke), 2755. Cutting off flesh. A debtor who could not satisfy his creditor could be punished by the creditor, tfho had the right of cutting a piece of flesh out of the delinquent's body. The XII Tables have this celebrated law, that several creditors could divide — actually dismember — the debtor's body between them; and the Norwegian Guledingslaw contains the same provision in the Leyfingsbalken, cap. 15. Burying alive. A customary capital punishment for women. See the song of Hans Sachs, II. 3, 192 a. Among the Ditmarsen it was the punish ment of a seduced girl. Neocorus, 2,547. Men