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The Green Bag

technics of codification have yet to be developed, and later attempts may show an advance in some directions, especially where so complicated a subject is to be treated as English real property law. The present work maintains a high standard. In point of accuracy it has the advantages necessarily attendant on painstaking weighing of each para graph by five different hands, all of them exceptionally capable. The typo graphical arrangement is admirable. In a model codification of American law a more complicated typographical scheme would be necessary, but for the nearly uniform body of English law, not split up like ours into forty-odd jurisdictional systems fusing often into no fewer than three positions on a single proposition, the arrangement of citations and small type commentary seems to achieve sim plicity at not too great a cost. HAZELTINE'S LAW OF THE AIR The Law of the Air: Three lectures delivered in the University of London at the request of the Faculty of Laws. By Harold D. Hazeltine. LL.D., Fellow and Law Lecturer of Emmanuel College, and reader in English law in the University of Cambridge. Hodder & Stoughton. publishers to University of London Press, London. Pp. 144 + 8 (notes). ($1.50 net.)

MR. HAZELTINE, who is an Ameri can, has in these three lectures covered pretty thoroughly the major legal problems presented by the advent of aeronautics as a practical science. In the broadest terms, the text consists of close reasoning upon substantive law already existing, an examination of its actual or possible application to aerial questions and some speculation as to the peculiar aerial questions which are likely to be brought before the law. Through out his work runs an insistence on the necessity of maintaining state sovereignty in the air, a thesis practically undisputed among Anglo-Saxons, though combated in Europe. In fact, a third of the book,

the first lecture, is wholly devoted to this fundamental problem and the theo ries developed concerning it. As a preliminary study of aerial law, Mr. Hazeltine has made his volume essentially complete and has done a dis tinct service in correlating the work of previous writers on the subject, almost all of whom have written from the Con tinental point of view. While this statement holds true more particularly of the first lecture on the rights of states in the air-space, it is also applicable to the second lecture on the principles and problems of national law, in dealing with which Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is depended on to as great an extent as possible. These cases involve the application of the maxim cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum, particularly in respect to aerial trespass by overhanging signs, wires, etc. The close has been held to be broken by such aerial entries upon it, though it is not agreed whether it is a trespass or only a nuisance that is com mitted. The question is examined at length and serves to confirm the correct ness of the sovereignty theory of inter national law in respect to the air. Less disputed is the doctrine of abso lute liability of airmen for accidents. The well-known case of Guille v. Swann, 19 Johns. 381, is discussed in this con nection, but it is unfortunate that the author had not run across several Con tinental cases to the same effect which were available when he wrote. Mr. Hazeltine agrees with the present writer in believing that aerial law will be de veloped by international law to a greater extent than any other branch of law has been heretofore, and deems it therefore not amiss to cite extensively from Con tinental jurisprudence in considering questions of national jurisdiction where foreign decisions have come to his notice.