EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
CURRENT
LEGAL
671
LITERATURE
This department is designed to call attention to the articles in all the leading legalperiodicals of the preceding month and to new law books sent usfor review. Conducted by William C. Gray, of Fall River, Mass. Although the continued absence of the law school reviews still keeps this department at summer proportions the grade of the articles reviewed this month is good. The most important is probably Mr. Byles' account of the prospects of an international code for bills of exchange. Constitutional law occupies its usual prominent place. Next month this department will resume its regular proportions. BILLS AND NOTES. "The New Nego tiable Instruments Act," by Louis M. Greeley, Illinois Law Review (V. ii, p. 145). BILLS OF EXCHANGE (International Codification). In The Journal of the Society 0} Comparative Legislation (N. S., V. vii, p. 112), W. J. Barnard Byles writes on " Bills of Exchange and International Codification." Preparing an international code has long been a favorite occupation of international legal congresses. Dr. Meyer of the Prussian Court of Appeal has recently collected several of these draft codes. His collection and comments furnish the occasion of Mr. Byles' article. There are at present four groups of national codes on this subject: the German, the French, the Anglo-American and one intermediate between the German and the French. The German is an easy first in the race for suprem acy, with, taking the world as a whole, the Anglo-American in second place. Not only is German law, whose marked characteristic is excessive formalism, " predominant at the present day, but it would appear to be con tinually increasing its influence, as witness the most recent, and certainly not the least important, of European exchange laws, the Russian exchange law of May, 1902. Anglo-, American law, though it cannot be regarded as stationary, has scarcely made any appreciable advance outside Anglo-Saxon countries, while French law would appear to be actually retrograding before the advance of German principles. "That this predominance of German law constitutes, from the Anglo-Saxon point of view, a considerable difficulty in drafting any
bill of exchange law for international use, can hardly be gainsaid. Our law may not repre sent absolutely the last word on the subject, but it undoubtedly is the law best suited to the English trading community, evolved as it is from the actual practice of traders themselves, and not, as one has some suspicion is the case with German law, evolved from what is con sidered officially to be the proper practice for traders to adopt. It is difficult to point to more than three subjects as regards which English law may be considered to be at a dis advantage as compared with German and foreign law generally. These three are the retention of days of grace, the existence of the doctrine of reasonable time in reference to the presentment of bills payable at or a certain time after sight, and the absence of any means of guaranteeing payment of a bill equivalent to the ' aval ' of foreign law." Points of difference, however, exist on which Mr. Byles thinks there is no probability of Anglo-American law giving way. These are the questions of protest which we require only in the case of foreign bills; the limitation of actions which we treat as in no way excep tional, while in German law there are many complications and variations; and the ques tion of dishonor by non-acceptance, which only two laws outside of our group treat as equivalent to the refusal to pay a bill. In the others the only result of refusal to accept a bill is to entitle the holder to demand not pay ment but security of the drawer and other parties that the bill will be met at maturity. "A study of these draft codes forces one to the conclusion that an international exchange law has yet to be drafted which can have any
