E. L. Garvin, '99, is as usual above us all, being still on the twenty-fourth floor of the St. Paul building.

P. K. Wolcott, 'oo, continues to win cases against the "L" with Peckham, Warner & Strong.

Charles B. Crane, '95, associate editor with Mr. Logan, of Girard, on "Titles to Real Property," has been put on a salary.

Arthur M. King, '95, is still Assistant District Attorney in the U. S. Courts here.

The auburn-ribaldly yclept "red" on p. 365, June BRIEFwhiskers have gone the way of all earthly things-Sic transit gloria whiski! But the taste for Scotch and the thirst therefor are still unquenched and are making proselytes.

H. v. B.

Concerning Mr. Fritz v. Briesen's removal to Washington, the firm of Briesen & Knauth sent out this announcement :

"229 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.

"918 F STREET, N. W., WASHINGTON, D. C.

"Messrs. Briesen & Knauth beg to announce that they have this day opened a branch office in the National Union Building, 918 F Street, Washington, D. C., under the management of Fritz v. Briesen, Esq., of the New York Bar.

"This branch office will represent clients in the Patent Office and other government departments, and in litigated cases.

"NEW YORK, September Twentieth, Nineteen Hundred."

Bro. von Briesen was one of the active workers of the New York Phi Delta Phi Club and was pushing toward a home for the Club the coming year. His removal to Washington will be felt by the New York organization but unless we are in error the Washington Alumni fellows will now do what they should have done long since, viz., organize an alumni chapter. On October 2d, Mr. von Briesen writes us from Washington as follows: "Phi Delta Phi is fine here. Hendrick (John T. Hendrick, Marshall, '96) has been very kind and has done a great deal for me. He and I shall begin to organize a Washington Alumni Club. Phi Delta Phi is a great thing here. The men are kind and have time to take a man around."

H. B. Lister, '99, took his LL.M. last June and has formed a partnership in San Francisco with Robert B. Gaylord, Pomeroy, '97, and will devote himself to admiralty and patent law. Mr. Lister thought much of going to Cape Nome, where his brother-in-law owns a daily paper, and an announcement of his arrival in that far-off suburb of Uncle Sam's was expected. Mr. Lister has had many unique ex

periences for one so young and in this prosaic age. He graduated from the Kensington schools, England, giving special attention to mechanics and mathematics. He then sailed before the mast and was on the sailing ship that made the record to San Francisco via Cape Horn. He then acted as engineer on the Albatross during her deep-sea soundings and surveys in the Pacific, after which he aided in putting in the Oregon's engines. He then came east and had charge of the engine-room of the St. Paul when she made her record. After this he assisted in several of the trial trips of the Cramp torpedo boats and then took charge of the Aschenbrodel and the Cinderella, the two odd boats built by the late Col. Waring, While in charge of these last he began his law studies at the New York University Law School. Mr. Lister has written much for the engineering magazines, and last year published the "Marine Engineer's Year Book." We understand that he now has a more exhaustive work on the "Modern Marine Engine-Room" in preparation.

Prof. Isaac F. Russell, Field, secretary of the University of New York Law School and dean of its Woman's Department has had a third edition of his "Outlines of Law" issued by Baker, Voorhis & Co. The first edition was published in 1894, by L. K. Strouse & Co., and has been used since then by the junior class and the woman's classes in connection with Professor Russell's courses on Elementary Law and for the same purposes in some other law schools. The new edition is enlarged. The new chapters are: Introduction to the Study of Law; The New Magna Charta; The Influence of War on Our Constitutional History; Kinship in Legal Evolution; and Tenure of Real Property. Some of the other chapters are changed. The work is intended to give the beginner a view of the field and the subject he is to study and it does this admirably.

Professor Russell addressed the Department of Jurisprudence of the American Social Science Association at Washington, D. C., on "The Domain of the Written Law." The address is reported in full in the August Law Notes (Am.).

The subject is expansive enough for anyone and truly so for ́ Doctor Russell, he being a member of the New York Bar. He re

fers in opening to the eleven codes which hang threateningly over the profession of that State. All sorts of written laws, from the False Decretals forged in the names of the early Popes, to the Book of Mormon and the International Code reported by The Hague Peace Conference, are referred to and their origin and amendment briefly illustrated in the speaker's anecdotal manner which is not imitable upon

paper and was doubtless interesting enough to have made the learned delegates forget even the Washington climate.

Dr. Russell seems, as far as he expresses an opinion, to agree with Hon. James C. Carter, that "certainty results from the written law, while justice follows the law of judicial decision." He cites the case of the Holy Trinity Church against United States (143 U. S. 457) as an interesting exception to this principle. The United States Supreme Court there went clearly contrary to the letter of the statute in refusing to affirm the conviction of the plaintiff-in-error for violating the Contract Labor law by importing an English divine under agreement to employ him as rector.

The speaker concluded that, if it were really best that all our law should be written, who, pray, is to write it? In seeking in vain for a class of men to whom such a task could be intrusted this instructive remark is dropped: "The professors of law in academic institutions of high grade ought, indeed, to be masters of the science to the cultivation of which they have devoted their lives; but these men, at least on this side of the Atlantic, instead of drafting codes, are busily engaged in historical studies, marking the epochs when leading rules of the unwritten law were announced and making collections of cases to illustrate the evolution of law through adjudication." T. L. W.

Chas. F. Bostwick, Field, has been pushing a suit in the New York courts in order to settle a somewhat mooted question. Our preliminary note of the matter is this:

"The curious and anomalous situation which at present exists in the City of New York in regard to the jurisdiction of the Municipal Courts over non-residents and foreign corporations is in a fair way to be finally settled by the Court of Appeals. When the Greater New York charter was enacted, creating the present City of New York, the old District Courts of New York and Justices' Courts of Brooklyn were consolidated into a new court under the name of the Municipal Court. The former courts were known as poor men's courts, where persons having claims for small amounts could obtain a speedy trial at a nominal cost. To the astonishment of the legal profession at large and the public generally it was decided about one year ago that in changing the District Courts to Municipal Courts they had been deprived of all jurisdiction over foreign corporations and non-residents, and as no suit can be brought in any of the other courts of this city where the amount claimed is under $50, it followed that a great injustice was being done to the poorer classes who had such claims against the thousands of persons who, although having their offices and places of business in the City of New York, happen to sleep in New Jersey. Not satisfied with the decision of the Appellate Term, which caused all this havoc, the question was promptly appealed by a

plaintiff in one suit to the Appellate Division of the Second Department, sitting in Brooklyn, and by another plaintiff in another action to the Appellate Division of the First Department, sitting in the Borough of Manhattan. These courts are of equal dignity and power and both in the City of New York, and therefore, when the court in Brooklyn held that the Appellate Term was wrong and that the Municipal Courts did have jurisdiction over foreign corporations and nonresidents and the Appellate Division sitting in the Borough of Manhattan held just the opposite, great confusion resulted. Citizens of the same city can get one kind of law in one portion of the city and a directly opposite kind of law in another. In the hope of bringing order out of this chaos and of setting the question, once and for all, Messrs. Bostwick, Morrell (also Field) & Bates, acting as attorneys for Amasa Worthington, in his action against the London Guarantee and Accident Company, Limited, which was the first case to be heard by the Appellate Division of the First Department, made a motion before that court for leave to bring this question before the Court of Appeals, which motion was granted. Therefore an adjudication as to which of the two courts are right will be decided as soon as the matter can be argued before the Court of Appeals."

The New York Court of Appeals has just handed down a decision giving the Municipal Courts the needed jurisdiction.

J. B. Chittenden, 'oo, has been appointed to the chair of mathematics in the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. On July 10, 1900, he was married to Miss Evlyn Louise Betts, a member of the well-known Betts family of Brooklyn.

СНОАТЕ.

"Law and Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century," was the title of an address by Prof. A. V. Dicey, Choate, of Oxford, to the recent annual meeting of the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching. There is a somewhat lengthy report of the address in the July Law Notes (Am.).

Professor Dicey said that "legislation in England had been governed, during the nineteenth century, by three different currents of opinion. These currents might be roughly divided into three periods. The first he called the opinion of Blackstonian optimism and Eldonian fear of change, from 1800 to 1832. This period was characterized by a general absence of legal change, largely accounted for by the fact that Englishmen held that the British Constitution was almost perfect. One great exception, however, was the abolition of the slave-trade, largely the outcome of the great evangelical movement of the time. Another sign of that period was the non-natural reasons for irrational arrangements. Lord Eldon, for example, believed that the severity of the law, which made it possible for a woman to be hanged for stealing goods to the value of 5s., was itself an excellence, because it gave the judges an opportunity of showing the law's mercy.

second period, from 1820 to 1865, was that of Benthamite individualism. He described Benthamism as systematized laisser-faire. Personal freedom in every sphere was the war-cry of this period. From the time at which Benthamism became operative, nearly all the great reforms of the day had one character-they were all attempts to strike away everything which limited individual freedom of action. One of the most effective and wisest pieces of legislation for which the Benthamites were responsible was, in his opinion, the repeal of the usury laws. Bentham's tract exposing the fallacy of those laws had never been answered. He should like Lord James, or any of those zealous for the renewal of those laws, to write an answer to it. The third period, 1850 to 1900, could not be connected,. so far as his knowledge went, with the name of any one man. It was what he called the period of collectivism, for want of a better name. The essence of it appeared to be that the power of the State should direct and aid the individual in the attainment of his welfare and happiness. The legislation of this period was represented by the whole mass of the labor laws, free education, free libraries, etc. Having dealt with several other points, he said in conclusion that he did not think the changes of public opinion which had been witnessed in this century were any discredit to us. They showed that the great labor of the English people in every part of the civilized world had been to carry out certain ideas of justice. In the changes of English opinion with regard to law we saw the noblest side of the English people— their constant struggle for the enforcement of law and justice."

Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller, Choate, has written the opinion in two recent cases that are worth close reading by those studying contracts. The cases are Roehm v. Horst, and Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway Co. v. Clarke. The following brief notes of the cases are from the Central Law Journal.

"The case of Roehm v. Horst involves a question of breach of contract by renunciation before performance, and is perhaps as interesting and instructive as any case that has recently come before the courts. The facts are somewhat complicated and too lengthy to state, but the ruling of the court was, in substance, that an unqualified and positive refusal to perform a contract, though the performance thereof is not yet due, may, if the renunciation goes to the whole contract, be treated as a complete breach which will entitle the injured party to bring his action at once, and that the damages for breach of a contract by renunciation thereof before performance is due are measured by what the injured party would have suffered by the continued breach of the other party down to the time of complete performance, less any abatement by reason of circumstances of which he ought reasonably to have availed himself. The opinion is very learned, and exhaustively reviews the authorities on the subject."

"Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Ry. Co. v. Clarke, upholds a liberal construction of the doctrine of accord and satisfaction. Deciding that, where parties to a dispute deliberately agree on a basis of