Page:Yale Law Journal - Volume 27.pdf/1128

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 * } vigorously in its task of mutual benefit

It is to be hoped that its labor will

produce good results since among its resources it may count upon some of the

best intelligence in the hemisphere. No small role in its work has been assigned to some distinguished countrymen of Dr. Malagarriga himself. To sum up, the book under consideration gives evidence of laborious study, a satisfactory assimilation on the part of the author of prevailing doctrines of law and an excellent comprehension of the matter as a whole. Nevertheless, there is a certain lack of maturity naturally due to the youth of the author, and a certain undue readiness to suspect others. It is to the interest of us all that the latter weakness be held in check, not alone among jurists but among all who write and speak Gunam o A. SmmwELL Brooklyn, New York

An Outline Sketch of English Constitutional History. By George Burton Adams. Published by Yale University Press, New Haven. 1918. pp. 2o& $1.75.

What Professor Adams has heretofore written on the EngliSh constitution has been addressed primarily to students and specialists in the field of medieval English constitutional history, and to them his teaching is well known. It is summed up in his Origin of the English Constitution, a work published in 1912. The present volume he clearly intends for a wider public. It is brief in compass, non-technical in language and not freighted with the paraphernalia of historical research wherewith to deter non-academic readers from its perusal. It should prove valuable and stimulating to all who desire to acquaint themselves with the origin and development of Anglo-American conceptions of government and liberty. It is, however, a popular treatise on the English limited monarchy, the subject with which Mr. Adams' research has been concerned, rather than what he calls it, an outline sketch of English constitutional history, and it contains no account of many institutions of government that fall within the scope of the title which he has chosen. What is most original and significant in Mr. Adams' teachingis explained in large measure by the point of view from which he first approached the study of English institutions. He is not an Englishman and unlilre the classical constitutional historians of England his outlook has never been insular. His starting point was not the history of England at all, but continental, and especially Frankish feudalism; and it was his belief that the English constitution is of feudal origin that first turned his attention to its study. The weight of recent expert opinion, based upon laborious investigations in the sources of medieival English institutional history, not a little of which Mr. Adams has himself inspired, undoubtedly supports his argument. According to this, the central government of England is of Norman-French rather than of Saxon origin, as the classical school held; modern English political institutions have grown out of the feudal assembly of the Anglo-Norman kings; and the limited monarchy is derived from the idea of contract implied in the feudal relationship between the king and his barons, an idea that was first given institutional expression in Magna Carta. What that much-quoted and much-misrepresented document really did, says Mr. Adams,"was to lay down two fundamental principles which lie at the present day, as clearly as in 1215, at the foundation of the English constitution and of all constitutions derived from it First that there exist in the state certain laws so necessarily at the basis of the political organization of the time that the king,