PROGRESS OF THE LAW
A Digest of English Civil Law. By Edward Jenks (Editor?, the late W. M. Geldart, Sir William Holdsworth, R. W. Lee, Sir John C. Miles and William Latey. Third Edition. Two vols. (Butterworth. £3 I03.) THESE volumes achieve the difficult task of giving a reliable and lucid epitome of the civil law of England. " Civil law " is not defined, but the principal topics treated are Obligations, Property Law, Family Law and the Law of Succession. Criminal Law and Constitutional Law are not included, but, allowing for that, I know of no other book which could be so strongly recommended to a lawyer, whether British or foreign, as a succinct statement of English law. The last edition was in 1921 and I have been asked to review the present one for the layman rather than for the lawyer, and to make reasonably plain to the general reader the changes in the law which are recorded in the Digest as having taken place since that date. Lawyers, therefore (including the learned editor and his staff), are absolved from reading any more of this review.
By far the greatest changes that have occurred relate to land law. They are embodied in four great statutes of 1925 inspired by the late Lord Birkenhead—the Law of Property Act, the Settled Land Act, the Administration of Estates Act and the Trustee Act ; in some respects they refer also to property in goods. Unfortunately, their bulk and tech- nicality render it impossible to give any short and simple account of the alterations which they made. They extirpated some harmless fossils like the picturesque tenure of land by grand serjeanty and they abolished (with certain exceptions) one crying abuse, primogeniture in succession to land. Thus, where a person dies intestate, the rational system of succession, which has always been applicable to his personal property and in which primogeniture finds no place, now applies to his real property (a term roughly equivalent to land). But whether this great mass of legislation attained its main object, which was to make the transfer of land simpler, speedier and cheaper, is a moot point. Perhaps the fairest way of assessing it is to regard it as a step, but only a step, in this direction. To any one who knew the plight of the law before these Acts and the precise obstacles in the way of any sweeping
reform and who realised- the essential differences between land and goods, it was a great step. That is the best answer one can give to a layman who still complains that it takes tenfold more time and legal expense to get ownership of a bicycle-shed than to complete the purchase of a diamond necklace worth Li o,000.
In Family Law, two statutes of the year 1926, the Legitimacy Act and the Adoption Act, introduced in English law two institutions which-had been recognised in Roman law centuries before Justinian's Code of the sixth century. By the Legitimacy Act, subsequent inter-marriage of the parents of an illegitimate child will remove the disability, provided neither parent was at the date of the birth of the child validly marries to a third person. The Adoption Act enables the courts specified (which include a Court of Summary Juris- diction) to sanction the adoption of an unmarried minor. The consent of the parent or guardian of the adoptee must be given and there are stringent provisions against possible abuses of the rights thus created. Far more wide-reaching than these Acts is the Matrimonial Causes Act, 1937, with its sweeping amendments of the law concerning divorce, separation and nullity of marriage.
In the Law of Tort (which, broadly speaking, includes actions for damages for injuries to the person, property, or reputation) there have been several notable reforms. The Common Law (i.e., the law embodied in judicial decisions) did not, as a rule, allow survivorship of an action in tort either for an injured party or against a wrongdoer if either of them had died before the action was brought. Some statutory exceptions had been made to this rule, the chief one being an Act of 1846 rendered necessary by the deadliness of early railways. But there the law stood until the lethal properties of the motor vehicle, which slays its hundreds where the railway killed scores, made further amendment of the law imperative. A specially hard case was that of a person severely injured or killed by the negligence of a motor- driver who was himself killed by a motor accident. The Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, 1934, enacted that all causes of action, with a few exceptions, subsisting against or vested in any person on his death shall survive against or, as the case may be, for the benefit of his estate. Again, at Common Law, a husband was liable for his wife's torts, however innocent he might be of their commission. This singular rule, which made it more dangerous for a man to have a mischievous wife than to keep a savage dog (for he could kill the dog, but not the wife), was abolished by a Law Reform Act of 1935.
A judicial decision of the House of Lords, Donoghue v. Stevenson, in 1932 has considerably widened the liability of manufacturers of articles towards ultimate consumers or users of the articles which they put in circulation. In the case itself, a young lady became very ill through drinking ginger-beer from a bottle of opaque glass which included in the liquid the decomposed remains of a snail, and the manufacturer of the ginger-beer was held liable to her for negligence in its prepara- tion although there was no contract between him and the consumer. The principle, long recognised in America, extends, subject to some qualifications, to any products which cause injury in this way, if reasonable care on the part of the manufacturer could have prevented it. P. H. WINFIELD.
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