EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT seems to be due to the increasing inclination of solicitors to employ counsel for all con tentious matters, some of which the solicitors formerly attended to themselves. The fact that even the solicitor gets a higher fee when counsel are employed on these matters indi cates a reason for the modern tendency. PROPERTY (Contingent Remainders). In the July Law Quarterly Review (V. xxi, p. 265) Edward Jenks, under the title of "Future Interests in Land" replies to the proposition in the article by Mr. Kales (reviewed in our June number) that "independently of the English Contingent Remainders Act, legal con tingent remainders have, as the result of recent decisions, ceased to be affected by that possibility of failure which for upwards of three centuries at least was one of their recognized features." The author notes that this is of importance not only to the states of the Union, where no such statute has been passed, but to England in cases arising out of settlements made prior to the statute. The author objects to the inferences drawn by Mr. Kales from the decisions he cited, for they were nearly all rendered in ' ' cases in which the Court was called upon to decide not whether a particular limitation took effect, but how many members of a class could claim under it." All of these he says were influ enced by an attempt to avoid the hard law of the case of Festing v. Allen. The other cases cited by Mr. Kales, the author distinguishes apparently more easily. "Even, therefore, where it is a matter in dispute only between the different members of the same class, the courts have, within the last ten years, acknowledged the application of the rule whose existence Mr. Kales professes to doubt. And, as I said before, I believe there is absolutely no case in which a gift to a single person has been validated on the ground that, though it failed as a contingent remainder, it could take effect as an executory limitation under the Lechmcre and Lloyd rule. Even if there were, it would not prove Mr. Kales' thesis, unless it clearly admitted that the limitation in question created a remainder. "Mr. Kales' argument seems to me to amount to this: that because the courts have held certain particular forms of limitation to
603
have created executory interests, which are, of course, incapable of failure through abey ance of the seisin, therefore all future limita tions must be so treated. As the court has, in every such case, given elaborate reasons why, in its opinion, the limitations in question did not create contingent remainders, it seems rather hard on their lordships to treat their careful distinctions as mere subterfuges. Whether the two classes of future interests, which have existed side by side in English law for nearly 400 years, ought now to be assimi lated, is a question of policy which I do not propose to discuss here. It may even be that such an assimilation may eventually be brought about as the result of judicial decis ions. All I wish to point out is, that such a result has not yet been reached." PROPERTY. " Reform of Our Land Laws," by Eugene C. Massie, Virginia Law Register (V. xi, p. 359). PROPERTY (Restraint on Anticipation). An interesting criticism of recent English decisions on "Restraint on Anticipation Under the Married Women's Property Acts," by Kenneth R. Swan, appears in the July Law Quarterly Review (V. xxi, p. 233). The equitable doc trine protecting from creditors the separate estate of married women, settled with a re straint on anticipation, was early held to allow, creditors to enforce their claims only against income to which she was entitled at the time the contract was made and which remained in existence at the time of the judg ment. Various statutes have been passed to assist creditors in reaching a married woman's separate property, but all have carefully ex cluded from their provisions property which she is restrained from anticipating. In some recent cases in the House of Lords, however, while stating that the law with reference to restraint on anticipation has not been. changed by these statutes, the Court has declared that the creditor can reach income, which at the date of the judgment she has power to make liable for her engagements. The author criti cises this as the abandonment of a rational principle for an arbitrary limit, enabling a mar ried woman to anticipate her income to the
