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 377

The Editor's Bag ently to condemn some monopolistic

practices as wrongful per se.

But this

objection does not go to the root of the

statute, which may perform useful ser vice so far as it can be treated as some thing apart from a mere anti-monopoly law. Another objection to the act is

to work out principles and dispense justice in any civil or criminal proceed ings brought for violation of the rights of fair competition. THE

ENCOURAGEMENT OF LEGAL RESEARCH

that its vagueness leaves the task of deﬁning the methods of improper busi

HE London Law Journal apparently believes that in some respects,

ness competition entirely in the hands of the courts, which will of necessity proceed slowly in laying down new principles, the business world, in the

meantime, being kept in uncertainty as to what the law requires. This objec tion is somewhat serious, but it will become less year as the applying the of facts. In so far

important from year to courts make progress in statute to new groups as the act, whether on

account of its phraseology or because of the construction given to it by the courts, is to be interpreted as forbid ding monopoly as wrongful per se, in

the absence of improper business prac tices, it is distinctly bad and merits

Judge Gary's censure.

The great busi

ness interests of the country must come

at least, England offers less encourage ment to higher research in the law than

the United States. It does not belittle what is being done at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London, but in America, it remarks, “post graduate legal research is encouraged at every university." In view of the inactivity or want of other agencies, the Law Journal is led by a small stipend granted by the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn to hope that

the Inns of Court will do more for the promotion of scholarly studies. To emphasize the point, a quotation is

made from Maitland which cannot be displeasing to American ears:— “In

the

concluding

passage

of

a

famous lecture Maitland pointed to

together for mutual protection, and for

the great service which the Inns of

the promotion, also, of the interests of the laboring man and of the consumer,

Court had performed in the Middle

and there can be no harm even in price ﬁxing so long as prices are adjusted on a rational basis of actual cost of produc tion and commercial risk, and are not used as a foundation for extortionate dividends. There seems to be no real rea

son why the courts should not eventually develop a theory of prices analogous to the railway rate theories of the Inter

state Commerce Commission. There is no need of an elaborate administrative machinery poly articles,to inregulate the manner pricesthat of mono~ Judge

Ages in preserving English law from

the encroachments of foreign systems. And he drew the moral that if, in our own day, English law is to be preserved

from the disintegration that threatens it in the manifold developments of various parts of the Empire, the Inns of Court, by a higher conception of their educational responsibility, must again come to its aid. ‘In that case,‘ he said, ‘the glory of Bruges, the glory

Gary and Mr. Roosevelt have proposed,

of Bologna, and the glory of Harvard may yet be theirs.’" Whether our American universities are doing as much as the Law Journal

unless the courts

seems to assume is a question that might

be

found

unable