Section 21 of the Matrimonial Causes Act, 1857, provides that a wife deserted by her husband may apply to a metropolitan police magistrate for an order for the protection of her earnings; and the statute further provides that it shall be lawful for the husband and for his creditors to apply to the magistrate who made the order for the discharge thereof. A Mrs. Sharpe obtained such an order, and in 1864 her husband wished to apply for its discharge. He discovered that the magistrate who had made the order was dead; and the question what was now his proper course of action came before a bench composed of Cockburn C.J., Blackburn and Shee JJ., who decided unanimously that this was a casus omissus, and that it was not competent for the husband to apply to some other metropolitan magistrate who might present the advantage of being alive. Forthwith, and in the same year, there was passed the Matrimonial Causes Act, 1864, which consists of one section only, and which provides that ‘if the said magistrate shall have died or been removed or have become incapable of acting, then in every such case the husband... may apply to the magistrate for the time being acting as the successor or in the place of the magistrate who made the order.

The object which the makers of the Covenant of the League of Nations proposed to themselves was ‘to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security.’ The first of the means by which this object was to be attained was, according to the preamble of the Covenant, ‘the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war’; the operative part of the Covenant, following the preamble, in several passages expressly binds the members of the league ‘not to resort (or ‘not to go’) to war.’

The origins of the Office of Master of the Rolls are to be sought in the history of the development of the Chancery. The Chancery was at first a branch of the royal household closely connected with the king's chapel. The Chancellor was simply the king's chaplain who in the intervals of his proper duties acted as the king's secretary. As such he became the custodian of the king's seal,—later to be called the great seal to distinguish it from other and smaller seals,—and at length his secretarial duties increased so far that he became the head of a great administrative department.

Coke and Bacon, the two greatest lawyers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, were members of Trinity College. Bacon was the greatest jurist of his day. Coke was the greatest of our common lawyers. I account it a great honour that Trinity College should in 1926, the tercentenary of Bacon's death, have asked me to say something of Bacon as a lawyer, and that in this year, 1934, the tercentenary of Coke's death, it has asked me to give this lecture.

The determination of the true measure of damage in any individual case is seldom easy. It depends upon considerations of causation, and causation is primarily a matter for philosophic rather than legal inquiry. Hume was not prepared to adopt the ordinary conception of causation. ‘It were infinite for the law to judge the causes of causes and their impulsion one of another,’ said Bacon. In a modern case the same thought has been expressed in the words ‘Causation is not a chain but a net.’ Faced with metaphysical uncertainty the lawyer must find some base on which to build his structure, and he does it by following the course of the pragmatist and asking of any particular decision: Does it work ? If it does he has to fit it into a scheme which should be consistent with a number of other decisions which also work, but are not always governed by the strict rules of logic.

The theory of the abuse of rights is one which has been rejected by our law, with the result that the ancient brocard ‘dura lex sed lex’ finds its most vivid illustration in the present-day decisions of the Anglo-American Courts. The absolutist view of rights which is a feature of the Common Law was summed up by Lord Macnaghten in trenchant language when he said in Mayor of Bradford v. Pickles that although Mr. Pickles's conduct in wilfully depriving his fellow townsmen of part of their water supply might be ‘shocking to a moral philosopher’ there was nothing in the law of England which could stop him from being as ‘churlish, selfish and grasping’ as it was possible for a man to be. In other words our law has not hesitated to place the seal of its approval upon a theory of the extent of individual rights which can only be described as the consecration of the spirit of unrestricted egoism.

The addition, four years ago, to the Loeb Classical Library of the Nodes Atticae of Aulus Gellius has made available to English readers in a most convenient form a work of great interest and value to students of Roman Law. The Latin text has been edited with an English translation by Dr. Rolfe of the University of Pennsylvania, who appears to me to have performed a difficult task in a most satisfactory manner, and although, perhaps, not above criticism in dealing with some passages of technical import, to have produced a translation which will rank as the standard English version of this work for many years. In the extracts quoted from the work in this paper I have freely availed myself of Dr. Rolfe's translation, making only such modifications as will, I think, bring out more accurately words or passages of technical application.

If a German professor announces his intention of speaking on the inner relationship between English and Roman law, he must first state why he intends to do so. When I reviewed Roman law, and later on English law, from the German point of view, it struck me again and again that the two systems touch each other at many points. It is obvious that this relationship must be clearer to a person acquainted with German law (and therefore speaking as an outsider) than it is to an English student who understands his law by working within the system and appreciates it accordingly. This, then, is one justification. Since I have not been brought up in English law, I shall always remain a layman, despite all my efforts to penetrate its nature.

In Mills v. Armstrong Lord Bramwell, in commenting on the judgments in Thorogood v. Bryan, said: ‘At present I will only observe that the four judges were great lawyers, and I believe that an experienced lawyer may be, as it were, instinctively right without at the moment being able to give a good reason for his opinion.’ Although such intuitive judgments may be satisfactory as doing justice between the litigants in a particular case, there is always the danger that they may prove to be misleading from the standpoint of the further development of the law, for it is natural to assume that as the judge has reached conclusion X by means of reason Y, therefore if conclusion X is correct then reason Y must be correct also. In future cases reason Y is accepted without further consideration because it has in the precedent case apparently led to a desirable result, even though, in fact, there may be no valid connexion between the reason given and the result. It may be suggested with all respect that the recent case of Cutler v. United Dairies (London), Ltd. may in the future have such an effect on the development of English law for, although the conclusion reached in it is obviously just and in accordance with established law, nevertheless some of the reasons advanced by the Lords Justices in support of their judgment are of doubtful validity, and may, if accepted apart from the facts of the particular case, lead to unfortunate results.

The recent discussion of precedents in English law is of great interest to Continental lawyers, because Continental law also has some slight experience of the doctrine of binding force of judicial decisions.

The origin and growth in continental law of the doctrine of unjustified enrichment is not merely an object lesson of the greatest importance to comparative lawyers. It is also of peculiar interest to English lawyers because it affords an admirable illustration of the working of the system of precedent in the continental countries. Moreover, it furnishes abundant proof—if any be needed—of the fact that an elaborate system of rules based on judicial precedent can, and does, exist side by side with the provisions of codes which in their inception were designed to prevent case law from coming into existence.

The ever-increasing number of deaths caused by accidents in which motor vehicles are involved has naturally suggested to many people's minds that some alteration in our law is required. This is an idea not confined to laymen, for there are frequent references to the matter in the legal periodicals; it has been publicly discussed by practising lawyers and the attention of the Legislature has been directed to the problem of devising some new enactment.

[William Joseph Whittaker, after graduating as ‘Senior’ in the Law Tripos and Chancellor's Medallist, in 1888, and winning a Whewell Scholarship in 1890, was a very successful teacher in the Cambridge Law School till 1900, when he went into practice. In 1901 he was appointed Professor of English Law at University College, London, and, in 1905, to a post on the staff of the Council of Legal Education. In that year he married Hildegarde, daughter of Walter Wren, who survives him. He died in 1931.

The Report of the Committee on Ministers' Powers has now been available for more than a year, and the Committee's recommendations as to how far steps should be taken to secure the sovereignty of Parliament and the supremacy of law in the sphere of delegated legislation and judicial or quasijudicial powers exercised by Ministers of the Crown are well known. The Report has been reviewed and criticized by (inter alios) Dr. W. A. Robson, one of the principal witnesses before the Committee, and Mr. W. I. Jennings. Both of these writers are teachers of law, and their observations should be carefully studied.

The law is not called upon to intervene merely because the assets of one person may happen to be increased as the result of a corresponding diminution in the assets of another person. But it is always possible, in particular circumstances, that the enrichment of one person owing to the impoverishment of another is manifestly unjust, and this would seem to give rise to an obligation to make restitution which is based on principles of natural justice. The Civil Law has a moral basis and is consequently called upon to provide the necessary means to enable justice to be done in such cases.

When we contemplate the havoc which has been wrought in the field of English law by the enunciation of maxims of a rhetorical character —some of which are of uncertain origin and still more uncertain operation—it may, perhaps, seem strange that our law is so unreceptive when it comes to be a question of applying a broad general principle such as that of unjustified enrichment. The explanation seems to be that our law of quasi-contract, such as it is, has developed along a channel which was carved out for it by indebitatus assumpsit, and that this has proved to be too restricted to permit of the growth of remedies of a non-contractual nature, though it did not interfere with the destructive force of maxims of a negative character, as, for instance, when Lord Ellenborough applied the maxim of ignorantia iuris haud excusat in Bilbie v. Lumley to the case of money paid under a mistake of law.

In the three complementary parts into which this book is divided, namely, The Story, The Legal Solutions, and The Financial Solution, Sir Cecil Kisch has set out the several aspects of the famous Portuguese Bank Note Case (Banco de Portugal v. Waterlow & Sons, Ltd. [1932] A. C. 452) in a way to quicken the mind and gladden the heart of lawyer, economist and dilettante in detection alike. The primary purpose of the book, however, is to put to the test of economicanalysis the various views brought out in the course of the case as to the measure of loss to the Bank of Portugal arising from the fraudulent issue of Vasco da Gama notes

Now people in the street,’ said a learned judge in a modern case, ‘before they begin to think about it, is a very easy thing to say what amounts to an “attempt,” but when you come to analyse it, it becomes a little difficult.’

The text-books tell us a that at Common Law every attempt to commit any indictable crime, whether that ulterior crime be a felony or a misdemeanour, is itself a misdemeanour. Professor Sayre, of Harvard, in an article in the Harvard Law Review, has traced the growth of this rule which, he thinks, did not take its modern comprehensive form until a judgment of Lord Mansfield in 1784 in R. v. Scofield. Until that date there seems to have been no recognition of the doctrine that an attempt to commit any crime at all was itself a crime.