Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/543

NOTES. 517 parties as any other purchaser for value without notice. The word " trustee " apparently can give no notice of any equity in favor of the maker ; nor is there any authority for such a notion. The way in which the courts treat such notes is shown in Downer v. Read, 19 Mich. 493, where the word '* trustee " is said to be irierely descriptive. Though this descriptive epithet cannot be said to be superfluous, for it does create a possible -liability to persons claiming under the trustee, yet in a dispute between the parties to the note the epithet is immaterial. A trustee hold- ing a note appears, in brief, to be in a position like that of an indorsee for collection, who is certainly entitled to pass on the note, subject always to the trust expressed by the indorser for collection. This view is not incon- sistent with the decision in Bank v. Lange, supra, nor with AHcholson v. Chapman, i La. Ann. 222, and cases following it. The courts will in such cases give relief to the payee's cestuis, but not to the maker. Injunctions against Libels. — It has been generally considered that the jurisdiction of equity over torts only extended to violations of pro- perty rights. Thus it was said by Lord Hardwicke, in Huggonson' s Case^ 2 Atk. 469, that equity would not enjoin a libel, unless it were also a contempt of court ; and in 1873 a similar declaration was emphatically made in the case of Prudential Assurance Co. v. Knott, L. R. 10 Ch. 142. Five years later, however, it was stated in the cases of Beddow v. Beddow, 9 Ch. D. 92, and Quartz Hill Mining Co. v. Beall, 20 Ch. D. 501, that a libel might be in certain extreme cases restrained by injunction ; this opinion was confirmed by the Court of Appeal in Bonnard v. Ferry- man, [1891] 2 Ch. 269; and such an injunction has actually been granted in a few cases, notably in Monson v. Tussauds, [1894] i Q. B. 671. This innovation on the practice of the Court of Chancery seems to have been considered in the opinions in the four cases just mentioned, as authorized by the Common Law Procedure Act of 1854, and the Judicature Act of 1873. Whether these Acts, which were apparently intended to regulate only matters of form, ought to be construed as conferring on any court powers which no court had ever possessed before, seems to be extremely doubtful. The propriety of such an interpretation of these Acts, and of the assertion on any ground of a power to enjoin libels, is vigorously denied in the February number of the Law Magazine and Review, in an article written by Mr. H. C. Folkard. These late cases nevertheless continue to represent the law in England ; and the doubt whether they can properly be rested on statutory grounds, while from one point of view it simply suggests that these cases were erroneously decided, from another point of view seems to show that the jurisdiction of equity has actually been extended in an essential point without statutory aid. The American courts have adhered strictly to the early practice of the Court of Chancery, except perhaps in the case of Emack v. Kane, 34 Fed. Rep. 46 ; and the late English cases have had no effect in this country, being treated as grounded on statutes. (See Kiddv. Horry, 28 Fed. Rep. 773.) Neither in the early English cases, however, nor in the American cases, which merely follow them, are any very satisfactory reasons given why a violation of a personal right, such as the right to one's reputation, ought never to be restrained by injunction, except that the courts have never in fact issued such injunctions. Such a remedy will very seldom be