377
The Editor's Bag ently to condemn some monopolistic
practices as wrongful per se.
But this
objection does not go to the root of the
statute, which may perform useful ser vice so far as it can be treated as some thing apart from a mere anti-monopoly law. Another objection to the act is
to work out principles and dispense justice in any civil or criminal proceed ings brought for violation of the rights of fair competition. THE
ENCOURAGEMENT OF LEGAL RESEARCH
that its vagueness leaves the task of defining the methods of improper busi
HE London Law Journal apparently believes that in some respects,
ness competition entirely in the hands of the courts, which will of necessity proceed slowly in laying down new principles, the business world, in the
meantime, being kept in uncertainty as to what the law requires. This objec tion is somewhat serious, but it will become less year as the applying the of facts. In so far
important from year to courts make progress in statute to new groups as the act, whether on
account of its phraseology or because of the construction given to it by the courts, is to be interpreted as forbid ding monopoly as wrongful per se, in
the absence of improper business prac tices, it is distinctly bad and merits
Judge Gary's censure.
The great busi
ness interests of the country must come
at least, England offers less encourage ment to higher research in the law than
the United States. It does not belittle what is being done at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London, but in America, it remarks, “post graduate legal research is encouraged at every university." In view of the inactivity or want of other agencies, the Law Journal is led by a small stipend granted by the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn to hope that
the Inns of Court will do more for the promotion of scholarly studies. To emphasize the point, a quotation is
made from Maitland which cannot be displeasing to American ears:— “In
the
concluding
passage
of
a
famous lecture Maitland pointed to
together for mutual protection, and for
the great service which the Inns of
the promotion, also, of the interests of the laboring man and of the consumer,
Court had performed in the Middle
and there can be no harm even in price fixing so long as prices are adjusted on a rational basis of actual cost of produc tion and commercial risk, and are not used as a foundation for extortionate dividends. There seems to be no real rea
son why the courts should not eventually develop a theory of prices analogous to the railway rate theories of the Inter
state Commerce Commission. There is no need of an elaborate administrative machinery poly articles,to inregulate the manner pricesthat of mono~ Judge
Ages in preserving English law from
the encroachments of foreign systems. And he drew the moral that if, in our own day, English law is to be preserved
from the disintegration that threatens it in the manifold developments of various parts of the Empire, the Inns of Court, by a higher conception of their educational responsibility, must again come to its aid. ‘In that case,‘ he said, ‘the glory of Bruges, the glory
Gary and Mr. Roosevelt have proposed,
of Bologna, and the glory of Harvard may yet be theirs.’" Whether our American universities are doing as much as the Law Journal
unless the courts
seems to assume is a question that might
be
found
unable
