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THE GREEN BAG

FICTION. " A Suspended Sentence," by C. T. Revere, March McClure's (V. xxviii, p. 535)FICTION. " The Law Goes Aglimmering," by Frances Nelson, March National Magazine (V. xxv, p. 455). FICTION. "The Farce of Police Court Justice in New York," by Franklin Matthews, February Broadway Magazine (V. xvii, p 5"). HISTORY. " Maryland During the Eng lish Civil Wars," by Bernard C. Steiner, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1907. HISTORY. Frederick • Trevor Hill writes the third of his " Decisive Battles of the Law," in the March Harper's (V. cxiv, p. 557) de scribing the Hayes-Tilden contest. This series might more properly be described as " Decisive Battles of the Lawyers," since the subjects are rather political than legal. In the former aspect, however, this great constitutional compromise is also of importance, and the author's description is both entertaining and instructive. HISTORY. In Putnam's Monthly for March (V. i, p. 746), Ion Pedlicaris describes " An Experience in Bow Street." This is an amus ing account from the layman's point of view of the annoyances to which an entirely inno cent party may be subjected by litigation, into which he is accidentally drawn. INTERNATIONAL LAW (Arbitration Awards). "The weaving of the network of international agreements for the reference of disputes to arbitration has made so rapid a progress that the problems of international arbitration have ceased to be connected with the acceptance of the principle of agreements to arbitrate, and have entered the region of the practical application of arbitration clauses." "The Enforcement of International Arbi tral Awards," by " Aula Gentium," in the February Law Magazine and Review (V. xxxii, p. 155), suggests that " the analogies for the determination of the methods by which international arbitral awards are to be brought into existence and enforced, must be derived from the system of individual arbitration, and not from the system of dis tributive justice administered by national courts. . . . "The difficulty of enforcing private awards

was of necessity felt from the earliest times. In so far as the enforcement of awards in England (before comparatively recent legis lation), the system may be taken to have been derived from the Code of Justinian. Before dealing with that prae-statutory system we may point out that the modern system is merely the almost automatic transmutation of a duly constituted award into a rule of court with all the authority of a judgment declared by the court. In other words, the court of justice reaches down and takes up an award, and gives to it the sanction of its own machin ery of enforcement. Now that is a much later stage than international arbitration has yet approached. . . . "Apart from the clothing of a private award with the robe of state recognition, there were three sanctions which were not uncom monly inspired by the very terms of the sub mission. . . . "Now the first remedy was that which was provided by the Roman law, that is to say, the penalty. In order to be effective without recourse to the courts, the penalty must be a gage, because an action to recover a penalty must in itself suppose the sovereign execu tive." . . . The gage must be such as upon the declaration of the award automatically remains with the possessor,' or at any rate which needs no further step in order to secure its possession by the successful litigant state. The possession of the gage by a third party, or its control by the arbitration court itself; these with proper safeguards would be suffi cient to avoid the friction. The gage in some instances would be territory, in some instances would be money, or its equivalent; in some instances it might be an edict pronounced by the sovereign power of the litigant state, or a treaty declared by the litigant states, and in either case made subject to and needing only the authority of the arbitration court to make it effective. The next method which appears to have been adopted for the purpose of enforcing awards, was that of guarantee. There are international relations where, either from the relative superiority of a state (we have in stanced the United States of North America in relation to the independent states of South America), or from the exceptional obligations