SIR FREDERICK PoLLooK has done well in editing and publish-

ing in book form his valuable lectures on the common law de- livered "to the Law Schools of several American Universities last autumn." They are prefaced by " the address given at the request of the Harvard Law School Association for its Com- memoration of 1895," and followed by an admirable appendix on " English Law before the Norman Conquest," reprinted from the Law Quarterly Review, and now available for the use of the numerous students who must of necessity, both in England and America, possess this book. The work is fittingly dedicated to Professor F. W. Maitland, whose pro- found research into the origins of English law has rendered possible so much of Sir Frederick Pollock's own work.

The common law of England is the imperishable fact that binds the Mother-country and America together. It repre- sents, not less truly than do the common tongue and the common literature. that ultimate base, that ultimate com- munity of ideas, which unites the two Empires in spite of political separation. In fact, as Sir Frederick Pollock points out, separation only emphasises the fundamental value of our common law. He tells us that-

" Without this perfect independence of local sovereignty and

• The Expansion of the Common Law. By Sir Frederick Pollock, Bart., D.C.L., late Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence, Oxford. London 7, Stevens and Son. [6s.]

jurisdiction it would never have been made known bow deep and firm is the organic unity of our legal institutions and science, which the shock of severance and a century of independent judicial and legislative activity have left, in all essential features, un- touched."

Sir Frederick Pollock looks forward to the future of the common law as a link between the two peoples. He says :—

" We cannot forbear, I think, to look to the future and consider

what security we have for the maintenance of this vital unity Ten years ago [1885] the Supreme Court of the United States declared, in a judgment of admirable clearness and good sense which I trust will be followed in England when the occasion comes, that in matters of general commercial principle ' a diversity in the law as administered on the two sides of the Atlantic is greatly to be deprecated.' Shall this remain for all time a mere deprecation, appealing forcibly, no doubt, to the best sense of our highest tribunals. but still subject to human accidents? Is there not any way, besides and beyond the discussion of lawyers in books and otherwise, of assisting our ultimate authorities to agree ? Would not the best and surest way be that in matters of great weight, and general importance to the Common Law, they should assist one another? Certainly there are difficulties in the way of any such process : but is there in truth any insuperable difficulty ? The House of Lords, as we know, is entitled to consult the judges of the land, though not bound either to consult them in any particular case or, when they are consulted, to decide according to their opinion or that of the majority. There is nothing I know of in our constitution to prevent the House of Lords, if it should think fit, from desiring the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States, by some indirect process if not directly, and as a matter of personal favour, to communicate their collective or individual opinions on any question of general law ; nor, I should apprehend, can there be anything in the constitution of that most honourable Court or the office of its judges to prevent them from acceding to such a request if it could be done without prejudice to their regular duties."

As Sir Frederick points out, it could be done with even greater ease in the case of the Privy Council, and the help could be reciprocated from this side. Such joint cases would be very rare, but they would both strengthen the common law and the bond of unity. The proposal is, indeed, a fine inspiration, which should be carefully weighed by all in

authority on the two sides of the Atlantic. " There is no reason why we should not live in hope of our system of judicial law being confirmed and exalted in a judgment-seat more than national, in a tribunal more comprehensive, more authoritative, and more august than any the world has yet known." That will be " when an indestructible union of even wider grasp and higher potency than the federal bond of these States has knit our descendants into an invincible

and indestructible concord."

The lectures delivered in America in the autumn of 1903 are four in number, and deal with the expansion of the common law from various historical and philosophical points of view. In the first lecture, " The Foundations of Justice," the bases that have at all times supported the administration of the law in England are dealt with, and the continuity of the main principles of legal administration from Saxon times to the present hour exhibited. Different, indeed, was the Saxon Tribunal from ours to-day, but of both we can say : " Courts of Justice are public ; they judge between parties, and do not undertake an official inquiry, not even in criminal cases or in affairs of State ; the Court itself is the only authorised inter- preter of the law that it administers; and there is no personal or official privilege against its jurisdiction."

In the second chapter, "The Scales of Justice," Sir Frederick Pollock traces the development of our juridical system from the early days when the custom of the realm

—the common law—gradually displaced local, and often con- flicting, customs and jurisdictions from which there was no organised appeal to the "higher justice" of the King. The one law for the whole realm was not evolved, as it might well

have been, from the Roman law that was winning the chief place in Church and State through Europe. " Daring greatly to be insular, we stood aloof from the Pandects and the Lex Regia ; we made Parliament and the Year Books, and our seeming barbarism is justified round the world." The King's superior jurisdiction gradually became the ordinary jurisdic- tion, and it administered not a special but the ordinary, the common, law. The custom of the realm superseded the local customs, and the Courts of the King superseded the local Courts. By the middle of the thirteenth century the King's Justices were carrying the common law into every quarter of the kingdom, as well as permanently administering it at Westminster. There still remained in the King a "residuary jurisdiction" to meet extraordinary cases, and Sir Frederick Pollock exhibits in passages of great interest the way in which this jurisdiction became, as in the case of the Court of Chancery, useful and efficient by the fact of its trans- formation into an ordinary jurisdiction, and the way in which it failed where, as in the case of the Star Chamber, the effort was made to maintain it as an extraordinary and, so to speak, supra-legal jurisdiction. The King's power, in fact, must be delegated, must be administered, in a definite and certain manner. But the Judges have always been more than delegates, for their power cannot flow back to the King. He has long since parted with all his jurisdiction, residuary or otherwise, so far as the realm of England is concerned; while other Constitutional developments have vested in his Govern- ment any extraordinary jurisdiction he may possess with respect to Britain beyond the Seas.

The third chapter, "The Sword of Justice," shows how the administration of the criminal law followed in its develop- ment the development of the administration of the common law :—

"The capital fact for us is that the machinery of the King's Peace, from the Court of King's Bench to the rustic justice of petty sessions, was consolidated, between the twelfth and the six- teenth centuries, out of powers in their origin special and extra- ordinary ; and that having become ordinary, it was strong enough to hold its own against arbitrary additions even when they came with no small colour of public utility."

The last chapter, " The Law of Reason," makes good read- ing, and is a valuable contribution to a very difficult subject. It is curious, as Sir Frederick Pollock says, that no one before should have noticed the passage in the sixteenth century Doctor and Student where it is stated that to the common

lawyer Reason represents the set of ideas which were conveyed to the canonist by the term "the law of Nature." It seems clear that the ecclesiastics who really founded our common law, used in the process the old law of Nature under the name, the non-Roman, and therefore unobjectionable, name, of the law of Reason. The law of Reason, as is pointed out, has played a chief part in the development of the great branches of jurisprudence that have attained full, or compara- tively full, growth since the Renaissance, branches such as equity, the law merchant, international law, public and private, and municipal statutory law. The principles so developed have in our own day reacted on, and given a new capacity for usefulness to, the common law. The law of Nature is to-day, as we may believe it was to our jurists of the thirteenth century, a living force. It is, says Si Frederick Pollock, " a living embodiment of the collective reason of civilised mankind, and as such is adopted by the Common Law in substance though not always by name." Sir Frederick Pollock might well have mentioned an instance in which the common law has throughout our history clung close to the law of reasonableness. The common law has always insisted on Free-trade. It is too long a story to enter into here, but it is a fact which may well be kept in mind that the common law has always been the law of liberty as well with respect to the trading of Englishmen as with respect to their persons or their property.