This system has been long and thoroughly tried in Denmark, and
with great success. Each local community chooses its own tribunal,
generally consisting of three members, selected with reference to their
personal qualifications and high standing in public confidence. This
tribunal has original jurisdiction of every complaint which might be
the basis of a civil action. No civil action, therefore, can be heard in
any regular Court until it has been first heard in the “Court of Conciliation,”
and failed to end in an agreement there.
The principals appear in person and tell their own stories, and necessary witnesses are heard; “no counsel are allowed.” If the decision of the Court is accepted by both parties the judgment has the same legal effect as that of any ordinary Court; the dispute ends, and “lawyers’ fees are saved.”
During the first tive years of the system, out of 116,483 cases brought before the “Courts of Conciliation,” 74,742 were there settled; during the next five years 190,836 were heard and 121,970 settled, “and only one-half of the remainder were ever carried to actual litigation.”
In the recent case of Stone v. Graves, administrator, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts rules that a man must pay, under certain circumstances, for being shaved on Sunday. The plaintiff shaved a man sixty-nine times, fifty-two times occurring on Sunday. The man died, and the barber sued the administrator to recover. The defendant asked the Court to rule that, because the shaving was done on Sunday, the plaintiff could not recover. Mr. Justice Field, in a short opinion, remarks, that “if Mr. Graves wished to be shaved on the Lord’s day in his own house we cannot say, as matter of law, that it was not morally fit and proper that the plaintiff should shave him.”
THE LAW SCHOOL.
IN THE MOOT COURT.
Coram Keener, J.
Grant v. Attrill.
The defendant, holding a majority of the stock in a corporation, caused the directors to levy and threaten assessments for the avowed purpose of building works, but with the real purpose of enabling the defendant to get control of all the stock at a nominal price, the directors not intending to collect the assessment from the defendant. The plaintiff fearing that the assessment would be enforced and the proceeds not applied to the legitimate purposes of the corporation, sold his stock to the defendant, and now files this bill to have the transfer set aside. Held, That the secret motive of the directors did not make the assessment invalid; and that the fact that the plaintiff had been induced to make the transfer through mistrust of the management and of the way in which the proceeds of the assessment would be used, was not a sufficient ground for setting the transfer aside.
Bill in equity and demurrer thereto.
The bill is brought to set aside a transfer of stock and to have the defendant declared a trustee thereof for the plaintiff.
The bill alleges that the plaintiff subscribed for and was the owner of 200 shares of the capital stock of the “Crescent City Gas Light Co.,”
