In November, 1921, Lord Haldane delivered to the Cambridge University Law Society an address on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Cambridge Law Journal, vol. i, p. 143). He was then an ex-Lord Chancellor and for thirty-eight years had had experience of that tribunal-for twelve years as one of its judges. If it seems unnecessary and even unfortunate that the same subject should be given to me, I may point out—though only by way of confession and avoidance—that Lord Haldane on that occasion insisted that ‘You cannot learn much about it from documents’—‘unless you have lived in it and in the atmosphere you do not know what happens there’—‘the only way to study it is to watch it’.

The following notes are offered in the hope that they may be of some use to teachers and students who are using (as the writer has for some years used) Salmond's Jurisprudence as a text-book for the subject of the Nature and Classification of Rights. They do not pretend to be systematic, and they are meant to be supplementary to the excellent and informative notes of Mr. J. L. Parker to the ninth edition. The page references are to the ninth edition; the section references (§§) will serve for earlier editions as well.

I may, I hope not inappropriately, begin by recalling a story told by our Chairman's distinguished predecessor, Sir William Anson, about Mr. Gladstone. While he was out of office, in 1890 Mr. Gladstone accepted an invitation to visit All Souls. The invitation included a request that he would give some kind of an address to the members of the Union Society, which had been the scene of his triumphs as an undergraduate sixty years ago. He agreed to do so and in a discussion with his host, the Warden of All Souls, as to a choice of subject Mr. Gladstone said that the subject did not very much matter provided it was one of general interest. He was thereupon persuaded to choose his own topic, and in due course he gave an eloquent address to a large undergraduate audience on ‘The Connexion of Homer with recent Assyriological Discovery’.

In the year 1908 Professor W. W. Buckland published his book on The Roman Law of Slavery. There existed in England, before that time, no Roman legal studies in the modern sense; and it is no exaggeration to say that it is he qui fundavit ius civile. To-day every scholar in Roman Law or History, whether English or foreign, is acquainted with Buckland's Equity in Roman Law (1911), Elementary Principles of Roman Law (1912), Text-Book of Roman Law (1921, 2nd ed. 1932), Manual of Roman Law (1925, reprinted 1928, new edition to appear 1939), and Main Institutions of Roman Law (1931), and with Buckland and McNair's Roman Law and Common Law (1936).

The commendation of Mr. Hamlin's book Legal Education in Colonial New York in the foreword by Emeritus Professor Beale should ensure for it a warm welcome by the Cambridge Law Faculty, apart from the interest which its subject merits on the part of a body of teachers.

I.—Until quite modern times the expression ‘Criminal Science’ was taken to mean no more than study of criminal law. The nature and the method of criminal science at this stage is best illustrated by the well-known dictum of Carrara, one of the chief exponents of the classical school of criminal law, that ‘crime is not an entity in fact but an entity in law; it is not action but infraction’ (‘il delitto non è un ente di fatto ma un ente giuridico, è una infrazione e non un’azione’). The personality of the delinquent, the origin of crime, the nature and the efficacy of punishment, the relationship between society and criminal justice,—problems which now constitute such an important part of criminal research—for many decades remained completely outside the scope of criminal science as then understood.

It is a far cry to go back now to a controversy which took place almost fifty years ago between two of the foremost exponents respectively of the historical and practical schools of English law, Maitland and Challis. The technical subject of Remainders after Conditional Fees before the passing of De Donis was in question. According to Maitland's view, Remainders limited after Conditional Fees, were common enough, and he vouched Bracton, and a considerable number of Fines all prior to 1285, in support of his argument, at the same time admitting that no Writ protecting such Remainders had been found in any Registrum Brevium.

In English law the definitions of the most important crimes were framed in an age when economic conditions and social relations were simple and when the paramount need was to give protection rather against violence than against deceit. As time passed a much more complicated economic order developed and in consequence of this evolution the intellectual aspect of crime gained an ever increasing prominence at the expense of the physical aspect. Not only did more subtle forms of transgression in the economic sphere, such as are now the crimes of forgery, obtaining by false pretences, etc., make their appearance, but also the lines of demarcation between what should be regarded as business astuteness and what should be stigmatized as criminal fraud became more and more difficult to draw.

The student who seeks to discover the essential elements of the crime of Assault at Common Law as distinct from Battery does not receive much help from the standard text-books. Most of them in substance follow the description of assault given by Hawkins: ‘An assault is an attempt or offer, with force and violence, to do a corporal hurt to another.’

It is commonly stated that one of the many effects of the Statute of Uses, 1535, was that the power of devising land which had been acquired by means of uses was abolished. It has also been said that this power ‘would subsequently have been recovered through that construction of the Statute which afterwards gave rise to the modern system of trusts’, i.e. by the enforcement of a use upon a use as a trust. The object of this article is to suggest that on the construction of the Statute which became generally accepted by the Courts the Statute never in fact made it impossible to make what was in effect a devise by means of a use, but augmented the power to devise by making it possible to pass the legal estate; and further, that this fact was recognized long before the Restoration when uses upon a use were first regularly enforced as trusts.

The persistent offender occupies, together with the juvenile offender, the central position in criminality, so that every investigation of the genesis and dynamics of his delinquency, and every elaboration of rational methods for curtailing his anti-social activities, must find a place among the fundamental tasks of modern criminology and penal policy. Hence, those provisions of the Criminal Justice Bill, 1938, which deal with the treatment of persistent offenders are undoubtedly of the greatest interest and of particular significance. They are also important because, unlike the other provisions of the Bill, they do not follow the lines set out by the course of evolution hitherto followed but absolutely break with the system established by the Prevention of Crime Act of 1908 (Part II), and they introduce one feature which is entirely new. As nearly all the modern Continental penal legislative systems have also introduced new modes of dealing with persistent offenders, an examination of the English system will be useful for comparative purposes.

For reasons both of space and of simplicity, the scope of this article is restricted within narrow limits. The subject to be considered is the priority of mortgages made after 1925 which affect a legal estate in land. This by itself excludes any consideration of transitional provisions or of mortgages of an equitable interest; in addition, the questions of the Middlesex and Yorkshire Deeds Registries, tacking, and conflicts between more than two mortgages will be ignored. Except where otherwise indicated, ‘mortgage’ is used as including both a mortgage and a charge.

The boundary between the fields of mistake and impossibility in contract seems never yet to have been critically surveyed. But such a survey is badly needed, for it is plain that at the moment the law of mistake is in no less a state of confusion than is the law of impossibility or ‘frustration’. The outstanding case of recent years, Bell v. Lever Bros., Ltd. (1931), met with such universal and (if it may humbly be said) unmerited hostility from publicists in all quarters that this alone calls for an inquiry into the difficulties of the subject. There, has been a disturbing tendency among text-writers, led by Pollock, to profess an inability to understand the ratio deddendi of the case, to try to limit it for the future to its exact facts, and to refuse to recognize in it any legal principle.

The situation which is created when rules of quasi-contract are in conflict has been neglected by English writers and has also received little attention on the Continent. It is possible, no doubt, to explain this lack of interest on the ground that the question is not one which occurs very often in practice. The various Continental rules relating to quasi-contract do not, in substance, differ widely from one another. Further, the somewhat narrow view of quasi-contractual liability hitherto taken by English law has probably discouraged foreign creditors from pressing claims of this type in our Courts.

In many of the newer law libraries the English Reports Reprint is the only series covering cases before 1866. Even if, as in the older libraries, the original reports are themselves available, they are frequently so out of the way that it is not normally worth the trouble to consult them. Unfortunately, however, a reader who finds some abbreviated reference to a case decided before 1866 cannot be sure that it will be found in the Reprint. Despite the claim in the Index Chart that the Reprint is a ‘complete verbatim re-issue of all the decisions of the English Courts prior to 1866’, it does not include all the collateral reports, nor does it include the specialized reports of Bail Court, Bankruptcy, Railway and Canal, Election, Registration, Local Government, and Patent and Trade Mark cases. Thus the inexpert worker may waste some time before he discovers that, for instance, ‘D. & R.’ is not necessarily to be found in Volume 171, or that ‘Moo. J. B.’ is not a misprint for ‘Moo. L B.’ and is not to be found in Volume 72, or, for the matter of that, any other volume.

The aim of this article is to consider and state the effects upon private rights of treaties of peace, or, more precisely, of some of the normal contents of treaties of peace. We are not concerned with the automatic consequences of the coming into force of a treaty of peace, namely, the cessation of the operation of the many rules of law which affect the nationals and residents of a country upon its passing from a state of war into a state of peace.

We shall deal with the following topics:—

A.—Summary of public international law.

B.—Territorial changes.

C.—Change in nationality—plebiscite—options.

D.—Change in domicil?

E.—The scope of the power of a State to affect the private rights of its nationals.

F.—Effect upon nationals of third States.

G.—How far a peace treaty concluded by the British Crown involves legislation.

H.—The relation of the British Crown to its subjects in regard to a peace treaty.