Court Christian, by way of the statute of Westminster Second, under which actions "on the case" arose. But in this volume of manor rolls we find many actions for defamation about the time of the statute, some, I think (I speak now from memory), before that time, with every indication that they are of old. Nor is there anything in them — and the pleadings are often given in full — that savors of the Court Christian; there is no mention of "malitia" in any of the half-dozen cases which I have had the pleasure of seeing in the proofs.
When it is added that the trial in all these cases has been by jury, and apparently by the jury of presentment of the manor, enough will have been said, I trust, to make a strong case for the present volume, and to make the members of the society (may their tribe increase !) anxious to see it. A single case in it has been worth my guinea.
Melville M. Bigelow.
In the case of People v. O'Brien, 18 N. E. Rep. 692, recently decided in New York, and digested in the last number of the Review,[1] where a statute, after abrogating the charter of the Broadway Surface Railroad Company, bestowed its franchises gratuitously upon the city of New York, on the theory that corporate property,, ceasing to exist as such at the dissolution of the corporation, may be taken by the State without technically infringing any right of those previously interested therein, the court thus emphatically express themselves: "The contention that securities representing a large part of the world's wealth are beyond the reach of the protection which the Constitution gives to property, and are subject to the arbitrary will of successive legislatures, to sanction or destroy at their pleasure or discretion, is a proposition so repugnant to reason and justice, as well as the traditions of the Anglo-Saxon race in respect to the security of rights of property, that there is little reason to suppose that it will ever receive the sanction of the judiciary; and we desire, in unqualified terms, to express our disapprobation of such a doctrine."
This statement is particularly gratifying to those who remember the extravagant notions about the power of die State, current at the time of the unearthing of the frauds by which the Broadway Company procured its grant from the New York aldermen.
The statement recently made in an editorial of a well-known newspaper that the Supreme Court of the United States "is perhaps the most original creative piece of political construction known to history,"[1] is an extreme expression of the common opinion that our Supreme Court was almost entirely an original creation of the framers of the Constitution; in &ct, a wholly unprecedented piece of judicial machinery that sprang, as it were, full panoplied from their brains, as did Minerva from the head of Jove.
This romantic idea that the entire Constitution was thus the spontaneous offspring of the brain of its framers, expressed in Gladstone's famous saying, that "the American Constitution is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man,"[2] has been gradually shrinking away under the light of historical investigation, until at present the still undispelled romance attached to the
