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The Green Bag

with the recklessness that has too often been shown in the past, it is also inevitable that efforts will be made to amend or abolish it." English Law. "The Value of Modern English Decisions to the American Lawyer." By Edwin S. Oakes. Case & Comment, v. 18, p. 438 (Jan.). "This, then, is the practical value of modern English case law to the American lawyer, thac it furnishes him with an interpretation of the common law in the light of modern conditions, to which his courts lend an attentive ear; that it points the way to the solution of the novel questions that are the outcome of these condi tions; that it is constantly dealing with the same questions as are arising in his own courts; that it aids in, and sometimes controls, the con struction to be placed upon borrowed legis lation; and last, but not least, more than giving him mere decisions, it helps him to attain that wider horizon and comprehensive grasp of principle which distinguishes the well-equipped lawyer from the shallow empiricist." A feature of this article is the valuable cita tions of parallel English and American decisions covering similar points of law. Evidence. See Expert Testimony, Procedure. Expert Testimony. "Expert Testimony." By Albert S. Osborn, author of "Questioned Documents." Fair Play (New York), v. 1, p» 11 (Jan. 13). Mr. Osborn proposes that Official Expert Witnesses shall be appointed by the Courts, to serve for ten years, who may be designated to act for the state or for either party in any trial, and whose fees when paid by the state shall be determined by the presiding judge. "Such a law would put the reform entirely into the hands of the courts and would certainly lessen some of the abuses. It would attract good men, if they were well paid, and would tend to clip the wings of the pretenders. There are those who would bring about reform by mak ing all experts testify for merely nominal fees; the truth is that the good men are not paid enough, and the fakirs are paid too much if paid anything." General Jurisprudence. "Democracy and the Common Law." By Roscoe Pound. Case & Comment, v. 18, p. 447 (Jan.). "Jurists of the eighteenth century believed that there were first principles of law inherent in nature, and that these principles were dis coverable by deduction as necessary results of human nature. They conceived it to be their task to discover these principles, to deduce a system from them, and to test all actual legal rules by them. But, as has always been true when men have held absolute theories of this sort, the supposed principles flowed in practice from one of two sources. On social, economic, and ethical questions, nature was always found to dictate the personal views of the individual jurist as they had been fixed by education, class interest, and association with others of his class. On legal questions, nature was found to

dictate for the most part the principles of law with which the individual jurist was familiar and under which he had grown up. Thus, for the Continental jurist, natural law meant for the most part an ideal development of the principles of the Roman law, which he knew and studied; for the common-law lawyer, in the same way, it meant an ideal development of the principles of the common law. The past generation of lawyers, brought up on Blackstone, learned this mode of thinking as part of the rudiments of legal education. More recently, our histori cal legal scholarship, assuming that all of our legal system is at least implicit in the reports of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, if not in the Year Books, has given us a natural law upon historical premises. Hence scholar and lawyer concurred in what became a thor oughgoing conviction of the nineteenth cen tury lawyer, that at least the principal dogmas of the common law were of universal validity and were established by nature. . . . "We may have confidence . . . that the common-law ideas of making and applying law, and of the supremacy of law will prevail in the end. But we must not hope to save the absolute theory of law, the theory that the main rules and dogmas of ninteenth-century Ameri can common law have been intrenched in our institutions, or are ordained by nature. Such a theory, and it has been maintained and put in force too often in the immediate past, is comparable only to the stout resistance of Coke to the rise of the court of chancery, and the proposition of Holt to the law merchant. Un happily like notions of finality have been held by some of the great lawyers of all times, in periods of growth. Nor have such notions been confined to the conservative lawyer. It is impressive to recollect that Thomas Jeffer son stood for limiting the reception of the common law to the first year of George III, because it would 'rid us of Mansfield's inno vations!' Happily the common law has always proved too vital to be confined by such theories. Much as we are bound to resist the attempts to deprive our courts of what little independence remains to them, and to make them mouth pieces of the will of the majority for the time being, instead of oracles of reason, we must likewise oppose the notion of finality, the idea that the main dictates of legal reason for all time have been set forth fully and completely, leaving to us but a few dry details of applicacation wherever we encounter it. The common law is in quite as much danger from the latter as from the former." Gifts. "How Far Interests Limited to Take Effect 'When Debts are Paid' or 'An Estate Settled' or a 'Trust Executed and Per formed' are Void for Remoteness." By Albert M. Kales. 6 Illinois Law Review 373 (Jan.). When gifts in this form are void for remote ness is discussed, with some important distinc tions which preclude a simple solution of the problem presented. Government. "The Constitutional History of Canada." By Justice William Renwick