" A Disgusted Layman's " Views.
403
inson, who tried to make a court believe the horse path and wheel ruts, so that her that she sought a lone interview with a man children might go and come from school in for the sole purpose of admonishing him of the highway without getting 'their clothes the impropriety of having offered to kiss wet. Alas! She fed the grass to her hus her against her will. The sequel was what band's horse, unmindful of the rights of Mr. might have been expected in case of a man Cole, the abutting owner of the fee. He yclept " Musser." ' sued them in trespass — quare (claw-some) An English lady once kept a spicy diary fregit? — and obtained a verdict for one of her disloyal kisses, and it was admitted cent damages. Mrs. Drew objected to the in evidence. But her husband was refused court's charge that she was a trespasser ab a divorce, for the diary contained hallucina initio, and that the rule de minimis lex did tions as to something else than mere kisses, not apply. This exception the Supreme also divers pious passages : e. g., "May the Court overruled. great Author of the being," etc., "direct," That lonely Green Mountain grassy road etc.2 reminds of the streets of some dull business places down South. In a Georgia case in The report of some cases is apt to sug- 1880,' it appeared the defendant had passed ' gest to the reader's mind the query : " Which an ordinance forbidding the running at large ligitant was most penny-wise and pound- of cattle in the streets, but indefinitely sus foolish?" In a Vermont suit in 1871,3 it pended its operation because the grass appeared that Mrs. Drew, with the highway- therein grew uncomfortably luxuriant. It surveyor's consent, cut the grass between was held that one gored by a cow running at large in the street had no cause of action 1 R. v. M., 78 Mo. against the city council. 2 See Robinson -'. Robinson, I Swab & Tr. 362. 3 Cole v. Drew, 44 Vt. 49.
1 Rivers v. Augusta City, Council, 65 Ga. 376.
A DISGUSTED LAYMAN'S" VIEWS OF LAW AND LAWYERS. THE comments, in a recent number of "The Green Bag," on a Massachu setts Court holding that it was bound by the rigor mortis of the Common Law, and citing such a mummy as Bracton, suggest to a "Disgusted Layman" that lawyers, as well as courts, seriously need moral, as well as mental, reformation. Such a layman is im perfectly informed as to just what modern legislative endorsement has been given the Common Law, but he understands that its provisions are more or less traditional in their application, that the system arises out of centuries of decisions on points that can not be, or are not, covered by express statute. Now if this is the foundation on
which this system rests, does it not follow as a necessary deduction from the premises that other decisions than those of Lord Rustedaway are of at least equal weight with his lordship's? Then where is the line to be drawn as to what, which, and when de cisions are entombed in that sarcophagus? This is the logical hammer that cracks that image. A practical hammer is the remark of .Chief Justice Paxson of Pennsylvania, that the Common Law is, and must be, plastic, conforming itself to the conditions it has to meet in the changed conditions of society, and as the layman learns that Judge Paxson is quite as eminent a lawyer and jur ist as any on the Massachusetts Courts, he
