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THE GREEN BAG

CURRENT LEGAL ARTICLES This department represents a selection of the most important leading articles in all the English and American legal periodicals of the preceding month. The space devoted to a summary does not always represent the relative importance of the article, for essays of the most permanent value are usually so condensed tn style that further abbre viation is impracticable.

ASSOCIATIONS (Legal Personality). Pro dallied with, the great problems of jurispru fessor F. W. Maitland contributes to the Jour dence. One is tempted to imagine that he nal of the Society of Comparative Legislation neVer repaid to the law of England the debt (No. xiv, p. 192), an interesting criticism of which he owed to it. He was a great advo the legal theory of corporations under the cate and a great pleader, we say, ' great, even title of "Moral Personality and Legal Person as a lawyer,' to use Lord Coleridge's critical ality." He quotes Professor Dicey's words phrase, but there is no evidence to show that that when a body of men bind themselves to he was a great judge, and little evidence to act for 'a common purpose "they create a prove that he was a great jurist. That is the body which, by no fiction of law, but by the way in which a perusal of the professional very nature of things, differs from the indi works inevitably at first strikes the reader. viduals of whom it is constituted." He ex He lived by the law, but the law did not li%'e plains the reason for the modern doctrine that by him. A second and third reading leave a such bodies are not distinct personalities his different impression. We realize that it is torically. The necessity for forming a legal greatly due to the fragmentary character of conception of a body of men as distinguished the legal remains that this somewhat sordid from the individuals composing it arose in impression arises. Bacon did. in fact, live by the middle ages, and the canonists in applying the law, and was on the whole careless as to their mediaeval learning and second-hand the literary merit of his legal writings. When Roman law held that the personality of the he thought that such writings were likely to corporation was a legal fiction and that it advance him, he was at times, as in the case was, therefore, a gift of the prince; hence the of the Four Arguments of Law, more careful. necessity for a charter to create a distinct But not always. We have but a disordered corporate personality. The author contends fragment of his famous Double Reading on that if the law permits men to form perma the Statute of Uses. We ought, if Bacon is a nently organized groups, they are of necessity great jurist, to be able to disregard the dis "right-and-duty-bearing-units, and if the law ordered condition of his legal writings, and to giver will not openly treat them as such he find therein an essential orderliness and dry will misrepresent the facts." Group person luminosity of thought calculated to give life to ality is no purely legal phenomenal. "For the law he lived by. The more closely Bacon's the morality of common sense the group is legal works are studied the more certain it person." becomes that this is the case, and the reader is BIOGRAPHY (Bacon). J. E. G. deMont- more and more tempted to regret that his legal conceptions have been so rarely pursued morency contributes to the Journal of the So ciety of Comparative Legislation (No. xiv, p. and so generally disregarded. It will be use ful briefly to consider the works in their chron 263), an article on Francis Bacon. It con tains an interesting account of Bacon's legal ological order." experiences and of his legal writings which He also calls attention to the fact that by remain, and deals sympathetically with the Bacon's Ordinances in Chancery, the practice charges of corruption against the great chan of that court was finally fixed and it was cellor as a part of the system of the times. made "a definite court of justice under ordered Of Bacon, as a jurist, it says: governance, and not a mere court of conscience dealing out an erratic measure of equity in "His massive intellect and subtle mind ap pear at first never to have been persistently graciously disordered fashion." applied to, though they often approached and BIOGRAPHY (Leibnitz). An account of