Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 8.djvu/254

238 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. Eminent Domain ; II. Jurisdiction ; III. The Public Use ; IV. Property ; V. The Authority to condemn ; VI. Acquisition other than by Con- demnation ; VII. Interferences with Property in Furtherance of Pub- lic Purposes ; VIII. Location and its Incidents ; IX. The Estate or Interest condemned ; X. Compensation and Damages ; XI. Procedure ; XII. Remedies ; XIII. The Improvement and Use of Streets ; XIV. Wa- ters. Of these chapters the tenth is considerably the longest; the weighty topics of Chapters II. and IV. occupy together much less than the space given to Chapter X. While one is disposed to question some- times the scientific neatness and proportion of the treatment, he must admit the simplicity and practical convenience of it. As a convenient, compact, sober, and accurate book of reference for the practitioner, Mr. Randolph's book may be heartily commended. J. B. T. Commentaries on the Law of Persons and Personal Property. Being an Introduction to the Study of Contracts. By Theodore W. Dwight, late Professor of Law at Columbia College, New York. Edited by Edward F. Dwight, of the New York Bar. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co. 1894. 8vo. pp. Ixii, 748. One of Professor Dwight's students has said of him, that " he made everything so plain as he 'went, and he went so quickly, that the student might delude himself with the belief that our whole jurisprudence was innate in himself, and only awaited the awakening touch of the great teacher. He aroused and he riveted the attention of all to a degree that was very great, and wholly exceptional in a school-room. Strangest of all, his own interest in the work appeared to be as fresh and exuberant as that of any of his listeners." (7 Harv. Law Rev. 209.) After finding, as one does, that all Professor Dwight's students agree in praising him and his success with his methods of teaching, one naturally turns with a lively interest to his publication of his lectures (he left them ready for the printer) to see what hope it shows for their success in print. In one thing, first of all, one finds the praise borne out. He does make everything thoroughly plain, and he gallops along through his sub- ject without making it less plain by his speed ; and thus he accomplishes a great deal. He treats of the sources of the law, the rights of persons as effected by infancy, marriage, and the like, and of all the vicissitudes of title and ownership, and on every page he makes one feel how he must have helped his students with the richness of his knowledge and experi- ence. If he treats of the early love of the Colonies for old constitutional principles, such as Magna Charta, he clothes the dry bones with the bit from Evelyn's diary, where that gentleman was told that the Colonies " might be curbed by a few of his Majesty's first-rate frigates, and with a bit of the curious history of the document itself." And this comes in in the notes of the book — just as it probably came in by the way in the lectures — in such a manner that it enlivens the whole subject without destroying the rapid continuity of the full and substantial treatment of the rights of personal liberty. On the whole, Professor Dwight's book, while it may well fail in the opinion of those who knew him to come up to the lectures on which it is based, contains a great mass of informa- tion, never pedantic and never even uninteresting, and shows to those who have never known him many of the qualities which led to his phe- nomenal success as a teacher. r. w. h.