Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 21.pdf/57

 44

The Green Bag

The Commercial Law League of America, at the midwinter meeting of the executive committee held in Cincinnati on January 1, selected Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island, as the place for the convention to be held July 19 to 23 of this year. General John B. Cotton of Washington, D. C, who was conspicuous in Massachusetts five years ago on account of the controversy over the payment of his commission on Civil War claims which he had collected for this State for the Federal Government, and who was Assistant Attorney-General of the United States under Attorney-General Miller, in the cabinet of President Harrison, died January 5 at the age of sixty-eight. He was first admitted to the bar in Maine in 1866, and during twenty years of practice there rose to a commanding position at the Maine bar. He later devoted much attention to the collection of war claims, and five years ago collected $1,611,740.85 from the national government for the State of Massachusetts. He retained the warrant of the Secretary of the Treasury in his possession, claiming a lien of $161,174 thereon for his services. After considerable correspondence and litiga tion, General Cotton succeeded in obtaining the fee which he had asked for. The annual meeting of the Maine State Bar Association was held January 14 at Augusta, Me. The principal address was by former Attorney-General Albert E. Pillsbury of Boston, whose subject was the scope of a constitutional amendment, sug gested by a North American Review article in which a federal ex-judge attacks the validity of the 15th amendment, and incidentally of the 13th and 14th also, as "additions" to the Constitution and not amendments of it and therefore beyond the amending power and void. The address pointed out that amend ment is universally defined and understood as extending to additions, that there is nothing in the history of judicial or other discussion of the Constitution to warrant the claim that additions cannot be made to it by amendment, and no judicial or other author ity for this claim; that if the question whether an amendment is "germane" in the parlia mentary sense can be applied to amendment of the Constitution, which he denies, the war amendments are germane to the purpose of the Constitution, as declared in the preamble.

The Allahabad Law Journal confesses to "a feeling of disappointment" upon reading "Hindu Family Law as Administered in British India," by Ernest John Trevelyan, D.C. L., Reader in Indian Law in the Uni versity of Oxford. "In the first place we are not clear as to whether there was any need for it, and secondly, supposing there were, we doubt whether that need has been efficiently supplied." Calcutta Weekly Notes, on the contrary, says that the materials of the work "have been worked up with an amount of thoroughness and judgment which will considerably lighten the labors of the bench and bar." A. Lawrence Lowell, the newly elected president of Harvard University, was ad mitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1880, and for seventeen years thereafter he engaged in the active practice of law in Boston, having as his partner his cousin, Francis Cabot Low ell of the class of '76, now better known as Judge Lowell of the United States Circuit Court. In 1891 the two took as their third partner Frederick Jesup Stimson.who is now Professor of Comparative Administration at Harvard, and this partnership continued until 1897. During these seventeen years of active practice Mr. Lowell acquired an exten sive clientele and proved particularly efficient and prudent in the handling of large estates and similar interests. Apropos of Lord Loreburn's bill for the addition of two Indian judges to the Court of Appeal, the London Law Journal says: "If the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal was one of the most striking incidents of 1907, the first sitting of the Court, which took place about the middle of May, may be counted one of the most notable events of 1908. ..... The Appellate Jurisdiction Act, in addition to empowering the Lord Chancellor to require Chancery as well as King's Bench judges to sit as additional judges in the Court of Appeal, provides for the better representation of India on the Judicial Committee [of the Privy Council], and for the attendance of judges from all the more important British pos sessions as assessors at the sittings of the Committee—an instalment of reform which will, it may be hoped, be soon followed by those larger measures which are required to make the 'Imperial Court of Appeal' worthy of its name and functions."