The conclusion of the fourteen days' hearing of the action
brought by the Taff Vale Railway Company against the The conclusion of the fourteen days' hearing of the action brought by the Taff Vale Railway Company against the general secretary, the organising secretary, and the trustees of the funds of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants marks the end of another stage in this lengthy legal fight The story of the contest is instructive. In August, 1900, a strike arose among the Taff Vale Railway Company's servants. Out of twelve hundred strikers, eight hundred broke their contracts with the Railway. The Company thereupon brought an action for a perpetual injunction, and applied for an interim injunction restraining the Society from organising the strike in an illegal manner. Mr. Justice Farwell, on Septem- ber 5th, 1900, granted this latter injunction, and held that a Trade-Union, registered under the Trade-Union Acts, 1871 and 1876, may be sued in its registered name. On November 21st, 1900, this decision was reversed by the Court of Appeal, and the interim injunction dissolved. On July 22nd, 1901, the decision of the Court of Appeal was reversed by the House of Lords, and the case was remitted to the King's Bench Division with Mr. Justice Farwell's judgments restored. The grounds of the decision are succinctly stated by Lord Halsbury : "If the Legislature has created a thing which can own property, which can employ servants, and which can inflict injury, it must be taken, I think, to have impliedly given the power to make it suable in a Court of Law for injuries purposely done by its authority and procurement." The Society was therefore suable and its funds liable.
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