THE NEW LAW REVIEW.* le The Law Quarterly Beriew keeps
up in point of interest and weight with its first number, it ought to take a high place in the list of first-class periodicals. There is ample room for a magazine of the kind. None of the strictly legal publications, weekly or quarterly, either aim to be read, or, as a matter of fact, are read outside the strictly legal circle. Yet seeing the way in which all political and social problems are bound-up with law, and have to be solved by the help of legal enactments or legal decisions, it is rather remarkable that this should be so. Law is not like medicine, or architecture, or science, or art,—something of which we make use now and then, and refer to occasionally in case of need,—but it is the form and body, as it were, of national and public life, and is the environment of social and private life. The history of the Constitution is mainly a history of legal development; and at every Constitutional crisis lawyers have come to the front. The political and social reformer, whether he attacks an Established Church or a system of house-building and management, or a restriction on marriage, needs to have the law, and the history of law, at his fingers' ends. The merchant, the doctor, the journalist, the dramatist, every professional man must necessarily be acquainted with at least the branch of the law affecting his own particular class of contracts and property; and even the most secluded of private individuals cannot escape the contact of the law in relation to marriagesettlements, and wills, and purchases of lands and goods. There is an ample field, therefore, of interest for a legal magazine to occupy, which shall treat, as The Law Quarterly promises to treat, "proposed legislation before Parliament," or questions of "immediate political and social interest in their legal aspect ;" and the wonder is that it has not been occupied before. The law and the lawyers must bear the blame. The law had been converted into such an amorphous mass of technical detail, and lawyers had, in consequence, been so lost to all ideas of principle and system, that it had become almost impossible for them to discuss legal questions in a manner that would instruct, much less interest, the ordinary reader. But of late the law itself has been so much improved, a certain amount of technical legal knowledge has become so much more widely spread, and has been conveyed in such a much more reasonable and human shape and method, that, for the first time perhaps since the days of Elizabeth, a law-magazine can take its place almost besides the purely political or literary publications. Not among the least of the causes which are tending to improve both the law and the lawyers have been the law-schools at the Universities, and particularly at Oxford. Indeed, the establishment of The Law Quarterly may be said to be the latest "Oxford movement," though its editor is only a lately-imported acquisition from Cambridge.
This first number of The Law Quarterly bears ample evidence of the vast progress that has taken place in lawyers. Its frontispiece, so to speak, the only technical article in it, consists of a tremendous philippic by Mr. Justice Stephen against that plague of lawyers and curse of commerce, the 17th section of the Statute of Frauds. How a Judge of a century, or even half a century, ago would have held up his hands in pious horror to hear a Judge of one of her Majesty's Courts, late at Westminster, give utterance to such sentiments as :—" If the great mass of the cases upon the section had been decided in the opposite way, I do not think it would have made much difference, except to the individual litigants ;" and "if none of them had even been reported, but each case decided simply by direct reference to the words of the Statute, and had then been forgotten, I believe that a vast deal of trouble would have been saved, and that nothing worth keeping would have been lost." Still greater would have been his horror when the same Judge, having, with the assistance of Mr. Pollock, codified the law resulting from the eighty-six words of the original section, into fourteen articles, occupying fourteen printed pages the size of the Fortnightly Beview, and "having cooked the dish with all possible care, can only recommend that it should be thrownout of window,—that the 17th section should be repealed, and the cases upon it be consigned to oblivion." Yet every unprejudiced person, legal or lay, who reads the article, will cordially agree with the writer, and feel inclined to congratulate the country on having such a legal iconoclast in the high places of the Law.
The next article, by the Warden of All Souls', contains a somewhat scathing criticism of what the author calls the Franchise Bill from a legal point of view,—viewed, that is, as a piece of legal draftmanship. It is somewhat odd that Sir W. Anson, taking-up the standpoint of a verbal and captious critic, should call the measure he discusses "The Franchise Bill," since it ceased to be a Bill and became an Act, at least a month before the Review made its appearance, and was christened at its birth by its sponsor, not "The Franchise Bill," but "The Representation of the People Bill." It must be admitted, however, that by whatever name it may be called, it is not a creditable specimen of scientific legislation when it "confers upon a man the right to vote," and then tells him that, to understand the terms upon which a man may vote, "he must import into an Act of 1884 the conditions of a repealed clause of an Act of 183-2, and then read the result in connection with, and subject to, Acts of 1869 and 1878." The Bill is to be construed as far as possible with the Representation of the People Acts ; these Acts, whenever the expression occurs, are to be held to include the Registration Acts, and the Registration Acts are to be held in their turn to include the Rating Acts." The Act may certainly be well taken "as an illustration of the urgent need of some sort of consolidation of the Statute. law of the Constitution." But it is hardly fair to call it "a mockery," seeing that the person for whose labours in wading through its complications the author feels so much sorrow, the £10 borough householder, can have no difficulty in getting his vote as a simple inhabitant-occupier. In fact, as is so often the case in English law, with all its complexities, the net result is simple, intelligible, and tolerably certain, though the way it is arrived at may be one which needs a legal Ariadne as a guide. It is tolerably certain that the way itself will never be made plain till we have got rid of that House of Revision, which generally revises Bills by tearing the proof. sheets to bits and throwing them in the faces of their authors, or introducing so many emendations and corrections that the poor draftsman cannot recognise his own handiwork.
Mr. Pollock's own article on "The King's Peace" is an interesting antiquarian sketch of the way in which the Peace grew up from an isolated and intermittent privilege or sanction attaching to the King's person and palace and immediate surroundings, into the Romana pax, which since the days of Henry VII. has been the common law of the land.
The most generally interesting and important feature of the number is Mr. Dicey's article on "Federal Government." He brings out, with great logical and legal skill, his prominent points; that Federalism implies a fixed and inflexible Constitution ; that it tends to a weak Legislative and a strong Judiciary body; and—a somewhat unexpected conclusion, seeing the nation from which most of our notions of Federalism are drawn—that it tends to Conservatism. His comparison of an Act of a State Legislature, or of Congress itself, under the Federal Constitution, to the bye-law of an English railway company or municipality, which the ordinary Federal Courts are constantly being called upon to set aside, or rather ignore as invalid, because contrary to law, is one of those happy illustrations which really illuminate a subject. The whole difference between the status of Congress and the status of Parliament, with all its consequences. follows from this difference,—the one being the true sovereign "over all persons, and in all causes supreme ; " the other being tied and bound by the chains of a Constitution which only an outside power can alter, and in which it is the duty of a really Supreme Court to keep it. Of course, the power of the Supreme Court is not a necessary feature of/ Federalism, though the English Privy Council does fulfil a similar function in relation to the Federal Parliament of Canada. In Switzerland, for instance, it is the Referendum,—that is, the constant interference of the sovereign people itself,—which is constantly reminding the Federal Assembly of its deficiency in the attributes of sovereignty, though even in Switzerland there is a tendency for the Bundes-gericht, or Federal Court, to assert its supremacy as interpreter, and, therefore, guardian of the Constitution. The result is that a Federal Constitution is a highly complicated and scientific piece of mechanism, and requires a highly-educated people, with an overwhelming reverence for law and law-abidinguess, to work it. It is, in fact, the latest Constitutional invention ; and however easily it might be applied between England and her Colonies, it is, perhaps, more questionable how it would work between England and Ireland, which is the case which Mr. Dicey has in his mind. In this connection the article is incomplete, -for of the one great parallel to a Federation between England and Ireland, thaN, between Austria and Hungary, he takes no notice. A discussion of the working of this Federation would have been alike more novel and more instructive than that of the American and Swiss Constitutions, which, after all, are pretty well-known, and the essential marks of which have been the subject of exhaustive discussion by De Tocqueville and Mr. Freeman. It is curious, too, that Mr. Dicey has omitted to notice one great difference between the Canadian and the American Constitutions, in that in the former everything not expressly conceded to the Provinces is reserved to the Dominion, which has a power of disallowance of statutes, subject to appeal to the Privy Council, while in the latter everything nut expressly granted to the Union is reserved to the States. There is one more hole we must pick, and that relates to the use of the word " Unitarian," to express such a Union as that of the United Kingdom. Unitarian is "a vile phrase," and has already in English its definite and appropriate meaning. Why then import the term from abroad ? Fancy talking of the Unitarian Kingdom ! Surely, if a definite distinction is wanted, it would be better to talk of a United State and a Federal State.
The other articles in the Review we have not space to notice, nor do they much call for notice. It is amusing, after seeing Mr. Roby on Mr. Moyle in the Academy, to see Mr. Moyle on Mr. Roby in The Law Quarterly. Sir Richard Pollock's string of anecdotes on "Justice in the Punjab" are interesting, though they hardly constitute a review. There is so much good stuff in the Review, and there is so much talent and energy going to waste at the Bar since so much of the intellect of the Universities has deserted the Church for the Law, that we hope to see it make -a more frequent appearance. Quarterlies cannot help being behind time in these days, and if this new venture is to be permanently successful, we cannot but think thzt it should remind the public of its existence more often than once in every three months.
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