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New Trials For Technical Errors, Edson R. Sunderland Jan 1919

New Trials For Technical Errors, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

A witness called to testify is presumed to be of good character. Hence no proof of it is necessary. But out of abundant caution this presumption is fortified by evidence. The witness is thus shown to be in fact exactly what the law presumes him to be. Result-the case is reversed for the commission of this grave and prejudicial error.-Lockett v. State (Ark. 1918), 207 S. W. 55. No one but an American lawyer could treat the above statement seriously. Only an American court could announce so extraordinary a decision. In no other English speaking country would the people tolerate …


Patent Law: Secret Use As Affecting Right To A Patent, John B. Waite Jan 1919

Patent Law: Secret Use As Affecting Right To A Patent, John B. Waite

Articles

An unusually obvious piece of judicial legislation, of practical importance to the manufacturing world, was promulgated in the case of Macbeth-Evans Glass Co. v. General Electric Co., 246 Fed. 695. The facts were that in 1903 Macbeth had invented a process for making glass. Since that time the plaintiff company, of which Macbeth was president, had been using that process. This use had, however, been "secret". In 1910 an employee of the plaintiff revealed the process to the Jefferson Glass Co., which at once began to use it, but on application of the Macbeth Co. the state court enjoined the …


Child Labor Law Case, Commerce Power Of Congress And Reserved Powers Of The States, Henry M. Bates Jan 1918

Child Labor Law Case, Commerce Power Of Congress And Reserved Powers Of The States, Henry M. Bates

Articles

The decision in the Child Labor Law case, Hammer v. Dagenhart, - U. S. -, 62 L. ed. -, decided June 3, 1918, would have caused much less surprise twenty-five years ago than it did when announced last June, for it is based upon two constitutional provisions concerning which the much wider and more varied experience of the last quarter century had developed theories, better defined and sounder than those of the earlier period. Those two provisions are the Tenth Amendment regarding the powers reserved to the States and the Commerce Clause. There has been an astonishing amount of faulty …


Re-Writing The Statute Of Frauds: Part Performance In Equity, Willard T. Barbour Jan 1918

Re-Writing The Statute Of Frauds: Part Performance In Equity, Willard T. Barbour

Articles

One of the most striking examples of judicial legislation is that process whereby courts of equity, from the end of the seventeenth century onwards, have in no small measure re-written the Statute of Frauds. Exception was added to exception until the doctrine kmown as "part performance" became firmly established. The doctrine was not evolved consistently and the basis of some applications of it is obscure. One who follows Sir Edward Frys admirable but futile attempt (Fry, SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE (ed. 5) §§ 580, ff.) to systematize the variant decisions of the English courts must feel doubtful whether any single theory will …


Acquiring Jurisdiction Without Personal Service, Seizure Of Aid Of Statute, John R. Rood Jan 1918

Acquiring Jurisdiction Without Personal Service, Seizure Of Aid Of Statute, John R. Rood

Articles

It is often assumed that courts can acquire jurisdiction only by personal service to give jurisdiction in personam, or by a seizure to give jurisdiction in rem; but it is not so. The assumption is induced no doubt by the fact that in the ordinary common law actions jurisdiction is acquired in that way. Mr. Justice Field very distinctly pointed out in the case of Pennoyer v. Neff (1877), 95 U. S. 714, that it was not the fact that the land was not seized that rendered the judgment void. It was the fact that the land was not the …


Performance Of An Existing Obligation As Consideration For A Promise, John B. Waite Jan 1918

Performance Of An Existing Obligation As Consideration For A Promise, John B. Waite

Articles

The dictum that if there be nothing in a rule flatly contradictory to reason the law will presume it to be well founded, and that the office of the judge is "jus dicere and not jus dare", is responsible for much agony of construction and tortious logic on the part of courts torn by desire to evade it in the interest of modern ideas of right. There is a trilogy of accepted legal principles which it has been particularly difficult for the courts to adhere to in spirit or to repudiate in letter. They are the propositions, that for a …


Inducing Breach Of Agreement By Employees Not To Join A Labor Union, In Order To Compel Unionization Of Plaintiff's Business, Horace Lafayette Wilgus Jan 1918

Inducing Breach Of Agreement By Employees Not To Join A Labor Union, In Order To Compel Unionization Of Plaintiff's Business, Horace Lafayette Wilgus

Articles

In Hitchnan Coal & Coke Compazy v. John Mitchell, et al., (Dec. 10, 1917), 38 Sup. Ct. 65, the novel question was presented to the Supreme Court of the United States, as to whether or not members of a labor Union could be enjoined from conspiring to persuade, and persuading, without violence or show of violence, plaintiff's employees, not members of the Union,-and who were working for plaintiff not for a specified time, but under an agreement not to continue in plaintiff's employment if they joined the Union, this agreement being fully known to defendants,-secretly to agree to join the …


Some Aspects Of Fifteenth Century Chancery, Willard T. Barbour Jan 1918

Some Aspects Of Fifteenth Century Chancery, Willard T. Barbour

Articles

IT is now more than thirty years since Justice Holmes in a brilliant and daring essay set on foot an inquiry which has revealed the remote beginnings of English equity. Equity and common law originated in one and the same procedure and existed for a long time, not only side by side, but quite undifferentiated from each other. Their origin is to be found in the system of royal justice which the genius of Henry II converted into the common law; but this royal justice was in the beginning as much outside of, or even antagonistic to, the ordinary judicial …


Power Of The U.S. Supreme Court To Enforce Judgments Against States, Henry M. Bates Jan 1918

Power Of The U.S. Supreme Court To Enforce Judgments Against States, Henry M. Bates

Articles

Four and one-half centuries later the "sovereign state" of Virginia sued the "sovereign state" of West Virginia to recover a sum of money alleged to be due upon the agreement of West Virginia to assume its proportionate share of the debt of the old state of Virginia. The suit was brought in the Supreme Court of the United States, which after prolonged consideration rendered judgment for the plaintiff. No execution or other compulsory process was issued, however. But now after delays for various reasons and pretexts urged by West Virginia the court is compelled to face the problem of what …


Cost Of Public Justice, John R. Rood Jan 1918

Cost Of Public Justice, John R. Rood

Articles

The common citizen who becomes victim of a wrong and seeks redress in the courts of America soon finds by bitter experience that it is better to bear those ills we have than go to law. The expense is more than the thing is worth. The result depends on who has the longest purse, the most endurance, and the shrewdest lawyer, and little on the merits of the case. When he gets to court he finds his remaining money is being spent, not in the trial of his case, but in deciding whether an absque hoc is a sine que …


Full Faith And Credit And Jurisdiction, Willard T. Barbour Jan 1918

Full Faith And Credit And Jurisdiction, Willard T. Barbour

Articles

The judgment of a sister state, when assailed by collateral attack, is often said to occupy a position intermediate between foreign and domestic judgments. Though the older American cases were inclined to examine into the merits of any foreign judgment, the present tendency is toward the adoption of the English view according to which a foreign judgment may be attacked collaterally only for want of jurisdiction or fraud. Dicey, Conflict of Laws (ed. 2) Ch. XVII; see note to Tremblay v. Aetna Life Insurance Co., 97 Me. 547, in 94 Am. St. Rep. 521, 538. But whereas any statement of …


The Writ Of Prohibition - Procedural Delay, Edson R. Sunderland Jan 1918

The Writ Of Prohibition - Procedural Delay, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

A disheartening recrudescence of procedural red-tape is found in a recent decision of the Supreme Court of Ohio. A contest arose over the jurisdiction of the Public Service Commission to fix telephone rates in Cleveland. The Commission was engaged in a determination as to the reasonableness of a schedule of rates filed by the telephone company, when a petition was filed in the Common Pleas Court for an injunction against the charging of rates other than those fixed by a city ordinance. Believing that under the statute the Public Service Commission had exclusive jurisdiction over the subject of rates, and …


A Modern Evolution In Remedial Rights - The Declaratory Judgment, Edson R. Sunderland Dec 1917

A Modern Evolution In Remedial Rights - The Declaratory Judgment, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

In early times the basis of jurisdiction is the existence and the constant assertion of physical power over the parties to the action, but as civilization advances the mere existence of such power tends to make its exercise less and less essential. If this is true, it must be because there is something in civilization itself which diminishes the necessity for a resort to actual force in sustaining the judgments of courts. And it is quite clear that civilization does supply an element which is theoretically capable of entirely supplanting the exercise of force in the assertion of jurisdiction. This …


Simplification Of Judicial Procedure In Federal Courts, Edson R. Sunderland Jan 1917

Simplification Of Judicial Procedure In Federal Courts, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

In 1914 the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives unanimously reported favorably upon a bill (H. R. 133) authorizing the Supreme Court of the United States to prescribe by rule the forms, kind and character of the entire pleading, practice and procedure to be used in all actions and proceedings at law in the federal courts, with a view to their simplification, which rules should, when promulgated, take precedence of any law in conflict therewith. On January 2, 1917, a similar bill (S. 4551) was favorably reported from the Senate Judiciary Committee by a distinguished graduate of this Law …


The Michigan Judicature Act Of 1915, Edson R. Sunderland Jan 1916

The Michigan Judicature Act Of 1915, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

IN 1848 a wave of reform in judicial procedure began to sweep over the United States. In that year the legislature of New York enacted the Code of Civil Procedure, a statute of far-reaching importance, for it became the source of and the model for similar legislation in almost two-thirds of the States in the Union.


Recovery Of The Purchase Price Before Title Has Passed, John B. Waite Jan 1916

Recovery Of The Purchase Price Before Title Has Passed, John B. Waite

Articles

In an action recently instituted by The General Electric Co. to recover on a contract to manufacture certain machinery for the defendant, which machinery the defendant had refused to accept, the trial court adopted the contract price as the measure of damages. The upper court approved this measure of damages, rejecting the argument that the measure should have been the difference between the market value and the contract price, and dismissed, as no longer appropriate to modern conditions, the decisions in Bement v. Smith, 15 Wend. (N. Y.) 493, and Shawhan v. Van Nest. 25 Oh. St. 490. The court …


The Sheriff's Return, Edson R. Sunderland Jan 1916

The Sheriff's Return, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

When William the Conqueror found himself military master of Britain, he was confronted by a governmental problem quite different from that which has usually accompanied foreign conquest. He did not subdue a nation already organized, substituting his power for that of its former ruler in the conventional way of conquerors. Britain was a geographical unit but politically and socially it was a congeries of loosely related communities. The natural law of survival of the fittest normally operates upon peoples as upon individuals, and develops centralized power as a means of self-preservation. But Britain had a substitute for this. The sheltering …


Mortgagee In Possession In New York And Michigan, Edgar N. Durfee Jan 1916

Mortgagee In Possession In New York And Michigan, Edgar N. Durfee

Articles

It is interesting to observe how tenaciously the old common law of mortgages has persisted in the state of New York, the very cradle of the modem lien theory of the mortgage. As early as 1802 Chancellor KENT began the importation into that state of Lord MANSFIELD'S Civil Law doctrines of mortgage. Johnson v. Hart, 3 Johns. Cas. 322. In 1814, in the case of Runyan v. Mersereau, 11 Johns. 534, the lien theory definitely triumphed over the old law. In other cases, both before and since the statute of 1828 denying ejectment to the mortgagee, the details of mortgage …


Taking Of Equitable Easements For Public Use, Edgar N. Durfee Jan 1916

Taking Of Equitable Easements For Public Use, Edgar N. Durfee

Articles

The case of Flynn v. New York &c Railway Co., decided by the Court of Appeals of New York in April last, involves the right of an owner of land to which is appurtenant a so-called equitable easement, arising under a covenant restricting the use of other land, to compensation upon the taking of the servient land for a public use inconsistent with the restriction. A tract of land was laid out in accordance with a plan, and all, lots therein were sold and conveyed by deeds containing covenants, inter alia, that, "No building or structure for any business purpose …


Sane Procedural Reform, Robert E. Bunker Jan 1915

Sane Procedural Reform, Robert E. Bunker

Articles

In these later days much is said about reforming the procedure of our courts, about recalllng our judges, at arbitrarily appointed times, and about reversing their decisions by popular vote. Most of what is said about these matters is said by those who have least reason to say it. It is no exaggeration to assert that those who are most severe in their criticism of the courts and of their procedure and most lavish in their suggestions of reform are they who know little, beyond the most general, about the courts and nothing about their procedure from personal contact with …


The Liability Of The Common Carrier As Determined By The Recent Decisions Of The United States Supreme Court, Edwin C. Goddard Jan 1915

The Liability Of The Common Carrier As Determined By The Recent Decisions Of The United States Supreme Court, Edwin C. Goddard

Articles

An understanding of the present day liability of the common carrier under conditions as they exist, especially in interstate shipments, is best reached by an historical journey from the early decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States to the end of the year just past.


Discharge In Bankruptcy Of Principal's Inchoate Obligation To Indemnify His Surety, Evans Holbrook Jan 1915

Discharge In Bankruptcy Of Principal's Inchoate Obligation To Indemnify His Surety, Evans Holbrook

Articles

In the recent case of R. P. Williams, et al. v. United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, 35 Sup. Ct. 289, the United States Supreme Court has at last passed upon a question that has vexed the courts ever since the enactment of the Bankruptcy Act of 1898. As stated by the Supreme Court, the question is this: "Does a discharge in bankruptcy acquit an express obligation of the principal to indemnify his surety against loss by reason of their joint bond conditioned to secure his faithful performance of a building contract broken prior to the bankruptcy when the surety …


The New Federal Equity Rules, Robert E. Bunker Jan 1913

The New Federal Equity Rules, Robert E. Bunker

Articles

On November 4, 1912 the Supreme Court of the United States, by formal order, adopted and established a code of rules for the courts of equity of the United States, which should take the place of all rules theretofore prescribed by the Supreme Court and then in force. Rule 81 provides: "These rules shall be in force on and after February 1, 1913, and shall govern all proceedings in cases then pending or thereafter brought, save that where in any then pending cause an order has been made or act done which cannot be changed without doing substantial injustice, the …


Preserving A Special Appearance, Edson R. Sunderland Jan 1911

Preserving A Special Appearance, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

No personal judgment against a defendant is valid unless the court which renders it has first obtained jurisdiction over the person of such defendant. This is elementary and fundamental, and goes to the essence of the judgment. And such jurisdiction must be secured through the actual service of process upon the defendant against whom the judgment is sought or through his voluntary appearance in the action.


The Standard Oil Decision: The Rule Of Reason, Horace Lafayette Wilgus Jan 1911

The Standard Oil Decision: The Rule Of Reason, Horace Lafayette Wilgus

Articles

After twenty-one years the Sherman Anti Trust Act has been applied to the typical combination restraining interstate commerce, which that act was designed to prevent.


The Judicial Code Of March 3, 1911, Robert E. Bunker Jan 1911

The Judicial Code Of March 3, 1911, Robert E. Bunker

Articles

Near the close of its last session, the Sixty-first Congress passed an act entitled "An Act to codify, revise and amend the laws relating to the judiciary." Approved March 3, 1911, which, by its own terms, Sec. 296, is to be designated and cited as "THE JUDICIAL CODE." This act is to become operative on and after Jan. 1, 1912.


The Federal Constitution Is Not Violated By A State Law Compelling One Accused Of Crime To Testify Against Himself, James H. Brewster Jan 1909

The Federal Constitution Is Not Violated By A State Law Compelling One Accused Of Crime To Testify Against Himself, James H. Brewster

Articles

A case has been recently decided by the Supreme Court of Colorado, upon a condition of facts which it seems, has not an exact parallel in any of the reports. After being in litigation for more than eleven years the question involved was finally settled by the court of last resort of that state. In effect the decision goes to the extent of saying, that when a note is endorsed specially and afterwards comes back to the party making such special endorsement, and the party reissues the same without striking out his endorsement, no new endorsement is necessary, since the …


Labor Organizations In Legislation, Jerome C. Knowlton Jan 1908

Labor Organizations In Legislation, Jerome C. Knowlton

Articles

During the first months of the current year, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down three decisions on important questions in labor legislation.1 The Employers' Liability Act was declared unconstitutional, but on grounds that may be avoided by subsequent legislation; the boycott was decided to be an unlawful conspiracy against interstate commerce, and in violation of the Anti-Trust Act and the congressional enactment providing criminal punishment for the discharge of an employee because of his membership in a labor organization was also held unconstitutional. These decisions have been unjustly spoken of by some, as unreasonably severe on labor …


Exit Of Doctrine Of Situs, John R. Rood Jan 1905

Exit Of Doctrine Of Situs, John R. Rood

Articles

A decision rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States on the 8th day of last May seems to mark the elimination of the doctrine of situs as a jurisdictional question in garnishment and attachment proceedings in the United States.


Some Legal Aspects Of Special Assessments, Frank L. Sage Jan 1904

Some Legal Aspects Of Special Assessments, Frank L. Sage

Articles

Taxes have been defined as "the enforced proportional contributions from persons and property levied by the state by virtue of its sovereignty for the support of the government and all public needs." The essential elements that we will notice particularly are two; first, that the contributions are proportional, that is, levied upon all in the same class according to some impartial standard, and second, that taxes can be levied for public purposes only.