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 The English Law Courts. he was appointed, along with Sir E. Jervis, A. E. Cockburn, Willes and Martin, a mem ber of the famous commission to whose labors we owe the common law procedure acts. In 1851 he became a member of another (the partnership law) committee. It is to him that we owe both the doctrine and the terms "limited liability" in connec tion with joint stock companies.

In 1856 Bramwell was made a Serjeant at law, and in the fol lowing year he was raised to the Bench as a Baron of the Court of Exchequer. He was sworn of the Privy Council in 1876. He retired at the end of 1881, re ceiving the unusual honor of a dinner from the bench of judges on this occa sion. In the latter years of his life Baron Bramwell was one of the ornaments of the House of Lords. He died in May, 1892. Quite a small vol ume of Bramwelliana THE DUKE OF might readily be writ ten. Lord Bramwell himself records how he turned a losing into a winning case at the outset of his career by taking a point which his leader, a man of slower apprehension, had missed. He expected that this signal success would have resulted in an immediate influx of heavy cases into his chambers. But no such inrush of business followed. The attorneys soon found him out, however, and the tide of work, when it once set in, knew no ebb. On the bench, Bramwell was great in criminal and in commercial cases. As a crimi nal administrator he was, in the eloquent

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language of Sir Henry James, " the hope of all that suffered and the dread of all that did wrong." He shared Sir Henry Haw kins' settled antipathy to the doctrine that crime is simply a kind of diseased or abnor mal development from social conditions; the very name of moral insanity operated upon him as an irritant, and both on the bench and in periodical literature (" Nineteenth Century," 1885-6) he often "went for" the fraternity of "mad doctors " with considerably more vigor than politeness. To him is attributed the well-known reply to a counsel who urged that his client was suffering from the disease klepto mania, "That is a disease which I am here to cure "; and whether this is so or not, he certainly de fined " an irresistible criminal impulse " as a criminal impulse not resisted, and loved to ask expert witnesses whether DEVONSHIRE. criminals alleged to be moral lunatics would have perpetrated their offenses "in the presence of a police man." The most favorable instance of Bramwell's performances in this direction is to be found in the trial (discussed in the late Sir James Stephen's History of the Criminal Law) of Dove, a half-witted farmer in Leeds, for the murder of his wife by strychnia poi soning. In spite of all the disputes to which the subject has given rise, the evidence points to the conclusion that it was the ruthless severity with which Bramwell sentenced the garroters to prison and the lash which stamped out this abominable type of offense.