Page:Legal Bibliography, Numbers 1 to 12, 1881 to 1890.djvu/15

SOULE & BUGBEE'S Legal Bibliography PUBLISHED AND DISTRIBUTED GRATUITOUSLY AT IRREGULAR INTERVALS No. BOSTON, MASS. Ma CONTENTS. Editorial Notes ■ Impostors and Adventurers English nnd Otlier Foreign Books . . . A Supplement to Eleventh Peters. . . , A New Work on Equity Pleadmg . . . . A New Treatise on Subrogation Reports Earlier than the Year.books . . Swell's Essentials of the Law Soule's Synonymes for Office Usg . . . , Star Chamber Cases , A Valuable and Interesting Law Book . PAGE Special List of Bargains 4 The Law of Bills and Notes 4 Marriage and Divorce 5 Important English Statutes £ Notes on Law Books 5 New Mass. Statutes 5 Heard's Oddities of the Law 5 Rare and Curious Books 6 Second-hand Books of Latest Editions . 6 Catalogue of Trials 7-S-9 Advertisements 10 EDITORIAL NOTES. In the next number of this paper we purjDOse devoting a col- umn to questions and answers on points of bibliography. For instance, concerning editions of English and American reports ; distinctions between originals and reprints, and between conden- sations and full reports ; imperfections or errors in catalogues, and unintelligible abbreviations and citations. We invite correspondence on these and other similar points. As a beginning, we print the following question, which has been put to us, and which we cannot answer : What does the abbreviation " Asp. Law Jour. " refer to. In the November number of "Legal Bibliography," we enu- merated the classes of books which a complete law library should include. The intention was to make the list a thorough one, but Judge Potter, of Rhode Island, wrote shortly before his death to call our attention to the omission of one important item : namely, Law Journals. This, added to the others, would make twelve divisions for a complete library. The accumulation of volumes of reports is a constant worry to lawyers and librarians. In America, especially, the contemiDO- raneous publication of nearly fifty series of Supreme Court Reports, with a multitude of volumes from inferior courts, and of reprints from the law magazines, is enough to bewilder the student of catalogues. It will surprise most of our readers, however, to know that, out of all the mass of legal literature which the librarian and the bookseller must examine, the greatest quantity, for the years covered, comes from the " Empire of India." Besides the well-defined series of reports, resembling in contents and style of publication those of the other British colonies, there is a maze of anomalous literature without a published bibliography, whose beginning and end are, perhaps, known to the jurist in India, but are difficult to discover from this distant point of examination. An act passed in 1843, requiring all the courts of the East Indian Company to record their judgment in English, seems to have been followed by orders to publish the records, and, from 1844 or 1845 to about i860, there was issued in each division of India — in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, the North-western Provinces, and the Lower Provinces — a separate series of monthly reports of each of the principal courts, — the Sudder Dewanny Adawlut, Fouj- daree Adawlut, the Nizamut Adawlut, and the Zillah Courts. Whether all four series were issued in each of the five provinces, it is difficult to say, for no one of the law libraries of this country or of Great Britain pretends to contain the whole of this be- wildering literature. Most of the volumes are without titles or indexes ; many of them have a separate paging for each of the subordinate provinces, whose cases are reported. The names of the parties are terrifically Oriental, and the effect of inspecting the series, and trying to catalogue them, is a despairing wonder that such decisions are perpetuated in such shape. IMPOSTORS AND ADVENTURERS. We have in press, and shall publish in a few days, a duodec- imo volume of about three hundred pages, containing some very curious and interesting trials of impostors and adventurers, se- lected from the French Reports by Horace W. Fuller, Esq., of the .Suffolk Bar. The cases here given, eight in number, are per- haps with two exceptions, new to English readers ; and none of them, we believe, have ever before been presented in such a form as to interest the general reader, and at the same time to be of some value to the legal profession. The Procureur General, or the Juge de Paix, who conducts the preliminary examinations in French criminal trials, is a combina- tion of the lawyer and the detective. He works up his case in a sort of dramatic style. His I'eports read like a stage play. This has given to the trials an interest which does not attach to the judicial proceedings in any other country. The cases which Mr. Fuller has so judiciously selected and jorepai'ed for the English reader — the layman as well as the lawyer — will, we think, be found altogether more entertaining than the imaginary cases described by Gaboriau and Boisgobey. The price of the book will be $1.00, bound either in fine cloth, or in boards covered with cartridge paper, — an entirely new and very tasteful style of binding. If sufficient encourage- ment is given by the sale of this book, it is our purpose to bring out other selections from the French trials, forming a series, under the general title of Noted French Trials. ENGLISH AND OTHER FOREIGN BOOKS. We have made satisfactory arrangements for the direct impor- tation, not only of English, Irish, Scotch, and British Colonial law books, but also of the best treatises published in France, Ger- many, and the other countries of Continental Europe. We keep constantly in stock, at moderate prices, the English reports which are in demand in the United States.