Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 10.pdf/284

 The Laws Lumber Room.

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THE LAW'S LUMBER ROOM. THIS is the title of a duodecimo volume recently published by A. C. McClurg & Co. of Chicago, under authorship of Francis Watt of the English bar, the main contents of which originally appeared ser iatim in that very conservative and schol arly British newspaper the " National Ob server." Its title and context very aptly characterize the limbo wherein have been laid to rest perished legal usages, defunct statutes, and those decisis to which the verb stare no longer attaches; nor to super autiquas vias. But, notwithstanding such "defunctitude," that limbo to explore is always interesting to the legal neophyte and re flectively instructive to every legal practi tioner. There are many unused heirlooms in an old family mansion, stowed away in unused- boxes,- closed closets and garrets, which a family descendant often from cu riosity inspects. So the trained lawyer often in fingering a first edition of "Blackstone's Commentaries" lingers over its pages of now obsolete legal lore, and sometimes takes down from the oldest shelf in his lib rary a copy of "Coke upon Lyttleton" or of "Fcarne on Contingent Remainders" (im primatur A. D. 1762), and wiping away the outside dust runs fingers through leaves listlessly as here and there catching sight of sentences that strike his apprehension as might the sight of a seventeenth century geography. Explorations of legal lumber rooms, and revivications of their original gloss of furni ture or portieres, are undeniably interesting to the veteran lawyer; and also challenging of curiosity to the freshman in a law school, as he indulges in a desipire in loco through the libraries of Harvard, Yale or Columbia, or ransacks in Hamilton College the anti quated books bequeathed to it by the late William Curtis Noyes.

Chief-Justice Charles P. Daly, of New York City, is said to have been once sur prised in his library by a legal comrade when reading for temporary mental relaxa tion a Year book volume; when being ral lied by his visitor for wasting time over it, is reported to have responded " Is it waste of time to amuse yourself by examining a mum my in the Metropolitan Museum of Central Park, or by walking around its obelisk?" To search out in the law's lumber room, for instance, the statutes of Sir Edmund Andros' colonial sway in Massachusetts or New York; to peruse the early State constitutions ofourUnion; to reminiscently tickle the brain by loitering over the pages of Dallas and "Cranch's Federal Reports " when the su preme court was nurturing infant admiralty, prize, patent, copyright and eminent do main law; or to glance at the constitution of the confederacy and its State statutes, is in each instance to centre legal wits on the exclamation, eheu fugaces aiuti, and the bet ter to appreciate American legal science in its present stage of evolution. How Sir James Macintosh's sensibilities, and possibly his risibilities, must have been excited when visiting a remote village in North Britain — soon after having among his remedial laws inspired the passage of one abolishing the pillory and the stocks — he found a poor fel low enduring the monotonous pains of the stocks in his ankles, and to the victim said, "Did n't you know that at my instance Par liament has abolished the stocks," and heard the plaintive response. "Anan, good sir? I only knows here I be." How the communis rixatrix of a Yankee village would curl her lip to the young law student who might tell her about the ducking-stool punishment admin istered by our fifteenth century forefathers to the common scold, or tell her how gal lantly Petruchio never applied that punish