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The Green Bag
term arrives. For many of these delays, our statutes are responsible; for others, we ourselves must take the blame. . . . "Delays during trial in general are the results of friction in our system, and of anti quated methods of procedure and rules of evidence and practice. The first which I would mention is the cumbersome and unreasonable method which obtains in im panelling a jury. . . . "The frequent adjournments during a trial cause much friction, and no little delay. . . . The trial has been had, and it is desired to appeal. How much time shall we allow? First, a sixty-day stipulation for preparing a statement or bill of exceptions, which will of course be extended for a further period of sixty days and probably for thirty more at the end of the second. It will take thirty days to amend and get the statement or bill settled. Thus at the end of six months we have a statement of our case prepared and settled. Acting promptly, the motion for a new trial should be disposed of within the seventh month, at the end of which we would then have sixty days to appeal. The appeal taken at the end of the ninth month, we have sixty days, or to the end of the eleventh month to file our transcript. "Thus, proceeding with unexceptionable dili gence under our present practice, we find ourselves in the Supreme Court just a year from the close of the trial. If the transcript is filed in the spring, after the commencement of the usual spring term of the Supreme Court, it will be the following fall term before the case is placed on the calendar of that court for a hearing. In that event it will doubtless be reached some time during the winter; an opinion will be filed, if the case is not a com plicated one, within a month or so after the argument; time is permitted for filing petition for re-hearing, and in the aggregate, the case will have been pending in the Supreme Court from nine months to a year before remittitur is finally sent down. Thus when the case is finally determined, it has been in course of litigation for the greater part of three years. But if there should have been an error com mitted during the trial below, so that the Supreme Court would reverse the judgment, and remand the case for new trial, the time would be correspondingly extended." See Pleading. Property and Contract. "Impairment of the Obligation of Contract by State Judicial Decisions." By W. F. Dodd. 4 Illinois Law Review 155 (Oct.). "By the Constitution of the United States the states are forbidden to pass any 'law impairing the obligation of contracts.' It is the purpose of this paper to consider to what extent the federal courts protect contracts from impairment by state judicial decisions, when no act has been passed by a state legis lature impairing contract obligations. Con tracts may be impaired by state judicial decisions in two manners: (1) by a decision holding unconstitutional a statute under
which contract rights have accrued, such decision being one which passes upon the validity of the law for the first time; (2) by a decision reversing a former decision, contract rights having been acquired upon the faith of the decision which is reversed, (a) by hold ing a law to be unconstitutional when similar laws had previously been held valid, (6) by altering common law principles, or by chang ing the interpretation of a statute admittedly valid. Bearing in mind these two methods of contract impairment, it will be well to consider the subject under several headings." Race Discrimination. "Race Distinctions in American Law, VIII, IX." By Gilbert Thomas Stephenson. 43 American Law Review 695 (Sept.-Oct.) . This installment treats, first, of the separa tion of the races in the schools, three recent incidents standing out, the Berea College affair, the exclusion of the Japanese from the San Francisco Schools, and President Eliot's assertion that the separation of the races in the Berea schools did not necessarily imply abandonment of the principle of equal treatment. The statutes of the various states and the conditions throughout the country are outlined. The paper deals, secondly, with the separa tion of the races in public conveyances, reviewing "Jim Crow" legislation from the close of the Civil War to the present time. See Treaty Power. Real Property. "The New York Test of Vested Remainders." By S. C. Huntington. 9 Columbia Law Review 586 (Nov.). Riparian Rights. See Waters. Sherman Anti-Trust Law. See Interstate Commerce, Monopolies. Socialism. "The Missing Essentials in Economic Science." By W. H. Mallock. Nineteenth Century and After, v. 66, p. 716 (Oct.). "Ifwe start with a given number of laborers, equal in productivity, working for an equal number of hours, and receiving as their reward equal shares of the total product . . . the only way in which the position of any group of equal laborers could be improved, except at the expense of the prosperity of all the rest, would be by the advent of some exceptional man or men, who by taking the labor of this group—say, the coal-producers— under his own control, and thus bringing superior knowledge to bear on it, should enable them to produce more than as much in two days as formerly they produced in six. . . . He, like the laborers under him, would demand his special reward; ... if the state refused to concede him this, thereby causing the cessation of his special productive efforts, the whole community would relapse into the condition from which it had just emerged. . . . "Thus the bargain which a socialistic state would have to strike, in the interest of the
