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THE HAND OF ESAU AND THE VOICE OF JACOB The fine which startled those with capital and tickled those without it has ceased for the moment to be the standard penalty. Three learned judges of the Court of Appeals of the Sixth Circuit have handed down a decision which is also charged with political electricity. Recognizing the popular interest in the decision and the feeling that such a fine is a blow in a battle of the many against a monopoly, it asserts with vigor the vested rights of property and chastises the judge of the lower court in language which to the unbiased reader seems as intemperate as any thing Judge Landis said or did. And now the law officers of the Federal Government in solemn conference assembled under the spot light of campaign journalism announce their determination to press for a review of this decision by the highest court of the land. In spite of the almost universal chorus of editorial approval, inspired in part, one sus pects, by the chastening influence of the recent panic, the result of the present appeal seems not beyond question. The reaffirmation of the inviolability of property rights all will heartily endorse. The rebuke to spectacular punishment, if deserved, is equally to be com mended. Is the question so free from doubt, however, as to justify the reviewing court in emerging from its judicial calm and dignity? Courts of equal eminence have not failed to recognize that the technical relation of cor poration and stockholder which was de veloped by judges out of the artificial mediasval conceptions of ecclesiastical institutions to satisfy a business demand of three generations ago does not always satisfy today the needs of the same public for which it was created. How far courts will strike beyond the legal fiction of artificial personality is a serious
question of public policy. The decisions of the courts already have recognized this and have made it a question of law, and the vague ness and uncertainty of the boundaries they have advanced make it one of the most per plexing questions with which lawyers now have to deal, for one of the elementary defi nitions they learned at school seems to have been undermined. If ever a case can be presented of a legal fiction shielding an offender, it is that of the Indiana corporation imper sonating the New Jersey corporation in Indiana which the verdict of the jury found guilty of a Crime. If the courts can ever go behind the artificial personality created by the state for the public benefit and reach its components who are really responsible for its acts, this case is an example. For the public as well as for the profession, this question transcends in im portance any question of guilt or fine. It affords an opportunity to make definite the limitations of a new development of the com mon law, and it is to be hoped that the Supreme Court of the United States will de termine the law on this point for our future guidance. PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION IN ENGLAND There is much to be said in favor of a separ ation of advocates from advisers in this coun try, in the way in which the profession has long been divided in England. Indeed it may well be believed that nothing would tend more to that expedition in trials which the public now vainly demands than the de velopment in our trial courts of a corps of trained lawyers and the elimination of the delays caused by the inexperienced. Since we have always supposed that the distinction was at least of such merit as to be assured of per manence in that country, it is somewhat
