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 Legal Vulgar Errors.

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is confusing a contract or other legal act or cent man, perhaps the bread-winner of a relation with the evidence of it. People family, killed or disabled. What does it who get married seldom realize that it is matter to him whether there was any negli the exchange of mutual promises at the gence on the company's part or not? The altar which makes the contract binding. company is the author of the injury; it can They fancy, like Mr. Macey, the parish pay, and it must pay. This is just the clerk in " Silas Marner," that " It's the retaliatory principle of early law, which regester does it," and that the signing of looked at what the plaintiff had suffered their names is "the glue." In the same without discriminating the degree of the way heroines of melodrama in humble life defendant's delinquency. cling with desperate tenacity to their mar Aristotle, with his usual acuteness, re riage lines, as if the validity of the marriage marks that there are a thousand ways of depended on their preservation. going wrong and only one of going right, Gifts are another matter on which people which may account for the infinite variety of errors, legal or otherwise. Certainly legal are much at fault. " Mind," says the in tending donor, "this ring is yours," or "is errors are as plentiful as blackberries. That you may shoot a burglar or a cat trespasser to be yours." If this is meant as an imme which is making night hideous on the tiles, diate gift inter vivos it ought to be accom panied (as every lawyer knows, but every that a judge's black cap is a funeral emblem layman does not) by delivery or be made (really it is only full dress), that deeds exe by deed. If it is meant to take effect on cuted on a Sunday are void, that the Queen the donor's death, then the intended gift is signs death-warrants, are just a few speci One a testamentary disposition, and (if not a mens of prevalent vulgar errors. donatio mortis eausd) must be made with deeply rooted but, needless to say, vulgar error, is that all lawyers are more or less the formalities required by the Wills Act. A common illusion of tenants is that the rascals — an assumption from which honest landlord is bound to do repairs, whereas the Mr. Tulliver, in the " Mill on the Floss," painful truth is that, in the absence of an 1 drew the inference (as many still do) that express covenant, the landlord is not bound! the ends of justice are only to be achieved to do anything, not even if the premises by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a weaker knave. The analogous view of become ruinous or insanitary (Gale v. Har law as a cockfight, in which the victory de vey, Times, May 9), and thereby uninhabit able. Again, a favorite fallacy of the British pends on securing an advocate who is a juryman is that there is no difference, where game-bird with the best pluck and the a railway company is concerned, between strongest spurs, is, it is to be feared, too injuria and damnum absque injuria. He like the fact to be reckoned among legal vulgar errors. — Law Journal. reasons thus with himself: Here is an inno


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