694
THE GREEN BAG
which the common law at first refused to rec ognize and afterwards did so only upon par ticular terms. The moment, then, that it is determined upon what principle the feudal system recognized the validity of one class of future interests and refused recognition of the other, you have the rational principle upon which the distinction between vested and con tingent remainders is to be drawn. The dis tinction, then, between vested and contingent remainders was actually set out when in Part I it was determined what future interests the common law always recognized and what ones it at first refused to recognize, but afterwards accepted upon particular terms. It has only remained in Part II (after distinguishing cer tain modern and exceptional notions of what remainders are vested and what contingent) to point out that what we have always called vested and contingent remainders correspond exactly to these two classes of interests. This method of exposition has, it is believed, not only given the distinction an historically rational basis for existence, but has resulted in more clearly divorcing the distinction itself from questions of construction and expressing the distinction in terms of a formula as mathe matical and certain as the rule in Shelley's case or the rule against perpetuities." PUBLIC POLICY. " State Legal Aid for the Poor," by J. P. Coldstream, Law Times (V. cxxi, p. 603). TORTS (Injunction). " A Study in the Law of Torts," by A. Inglis Clark Harvard Law Re view (V. xx, p. 46), is a closely reasoned article suggested by a complicated case from which "it seems that the owner of a reversionary interest in any land that is leased for a term of years to a tenant, and which is substantially injured by the aggregate operations of several persons who have acted independently of one another, cannot join any two or more of such persons as defendants in a single action for damages, and is therefore without a remedy in the nature of an action for compensation, if he cannot prove that an appreciable portion of the injury done to his land has been caused solely by the conduct of the single defendant
in any action he may bring to obtain compen sation for the loss he has sustained." Can the owner of the reversion in such a case obtain an injunction to restrain the sev eral independent persons? There is much judicial authority for the proposition that the equitable remedy of injunction is always a concurrent remedy for a wrong actionable under the common law. "But in a jurisdiction in which the same tribunals take cognizance of both legal and equitable rights, and administer simultane ously legal and equitable remedies, there does not seem to be any sufficient reason why a substantial injury to a reversionary interest in land should not be regarded as a remediable wrong, although it may be produced by the simultaneous conduct of a number of persons in circumstances in which the separate con duct of each of them is not an actionable invasion of any present right of the reversioner, if the separate conduct of each of the contributors to the injury to the reversioner's interest in the land is an actionable invasion of a legal right of the person in immediate possession of it." TORTS. In " Voluntary Assumption of Risk," I, in the November Harvard Law Re view (V. xx, p. 14), Francis H. Bohlen begins a study of that doctrine, declaring it but one of the expressions of the fundamental doctrine of the common law that volenli non fit injuria. due to the individualistic tendency of that law and its idea that each man must be left fretto work out his own destinies. Assumption of risk is carefully distinguished from the re lated defenses of consent and contributory negligence, and a beginning is made on the treatment of the subject in relation to the law of master and servant. TORTS (Damages). " Delayed Telegraph Messages — Mental Anguish," by Graham B. Smedley, Central Law Journal (V. Ixiii, p. 34o). WILLS. " Execution Testamentaire," par Ph. Bandouin, La Revue Legate (V. xii, p. 381).
