The University Law Review. — It is the present fashion for every prominent law school to issue a monthly or quarterly law journal of its own. The "Harvard Law Review" is easily the best of these, and the " Yale" is a good second. Now there comes "The University Law Review," a monthly, in the interests of the University of the City of New York, conducted by Austin Abbott, Dean of the Law School. Whatever Mr. Abbott fathers is sure to be commend able in purpose and highly respectable in execution. This opening number is very promising, the notes of cases being of remarkable interest and value.
West Virginia Bar Association. — The ad dress to this body, by the president, Mr. R. T. Barton, at its fifth annual meeting, in April last, on "The Punishment of Crime," is at hand and is a valuable production. If in speaking of the numbers that have attended the meetings the president in cludes only lawyers, this association is a wondrous exception, for he speaks of 257 in 1888, and of 439 in 1892, as having "gathered together." If these figures mean lawyers, the rest of the State must have been very peaceable for one or two days. Mr. Barton gives one piece of information which will probably be new to most of our readers as it is to us. Speaking of the "bier test," or compelling the suspected murderer to touch the corpse of the vic tim, which it was believed would bleed if he was guilty, he says : — "The records of Accomac County, Va., show that the test was applied in the case of Paul Carter in 1 680; so in Boyer County, New Jersey, in 1767, in the case of a slave suspected of murder, and evidence that such a test had been successfully applied was admitted, with other evidence, in the prosecution of a man named Gette in Pennsylvania as late as 1833. In the preliminary proceedings, but not under judicial sanction, this test was applied in Pennsyl vania in one case in 1860; at Verdiersville, in Virginia in 1868, and at Lebanon, Illinois, in 1869." Mr. Barton's paper contains valuable and con venient statistics of crime and punishment in this country in recent years. He observes that Blackstone's enumeration of capital offences at one hun dred and sixty is exaggerated, because it makes a distinct offence, for example, of killing the particular species of game under a statute punishing the killing of game. Another paper read on the same occasion is "Extrinsic Evidence in respect to Written Instru ments,'" by Prof. Charles A. Graves, of Washington and Lee University Law School. This is a learned and judicious monograph, especially addressed to the subject of wills. It will prove of permanent value, not only by reason of its excellent selection of and comment upon cases, but by reason of the
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writer's independent and vigorous views of the subject on principle. He gives the foolish and pedantic old notion of Lord Bacon about the distinction between patent and latent ambiguity the coup de grace, although perhaps it scarcely needed it, for if not extinct it never would have had any more stand ing in modern courts unless " holpen " by statute. We heartily commend this paper to all legal scholars.
NOTES OF CASES. Injunction Against Publication of Biog raphy. — In Corliss v. E. W. Walker Co., August, 1893, United States Circuit Court, D. Mass. (57 Fed. Rep. 434), it was held that the publication and selling of a biography of a deceased person, who had become famous during his lifetime as an inventor, could not be restrained by injunction, upon the suit of his widow and children. But it was held that the publication of a picture, intended to accompany the biography, and which had been taken from a portrait and photograph of the deceased, would be restrained, it appearing that respondent had not observed the conditions upon which the painting and photograph were obtained. The court distinguished Schuyler v. Curtis, 15. N.Y. Supp. 787, where the erection of a statue of a private person was restrained. The court held that it had no jurisdiction here because there was no injury to property. It also holds, very unnecessarily, that it had no jurisdiction to restrain a libel (citing Boston Diatite Co. v. Florence Manuf. Co. 114 Mass. 69; Brandreth -v. Lance, 8 Paige, 24; Assurance Co. v. Knott, 10 Ch. App. 142) because there was no pretence that the publication was libellous. On the other point Pollard v. Photographic Co. 40 Ch. Div. 345, was cited.
Using a Person's Body as a Shield.— Russell Sage, the notorious " put and call" broker of New York, has successfully defended a recent suit for breach of promise brought by an old servant in his family, but he is still in trouble with a person of the other sex. The facts were that a man called on Sage and handed him a letter threatening that- if he did not immediately hand over to him a large sum of money, he would blow him up with dynamite which he had there in his satchel. At this point the plain tiff, Laidlaw, entered, and Sage left the vicinity of the other man, went up to the plaintiff, still watching the other, took his left hand in both of his, and gently turned him between the first visitor and Sage, all the time talking in an expostulatory tone to the crank, and just then the crank exploded a bomb,
