REVIEWS. 237 REVIEWS. The Law of Eminent Domain in the United States. By Carman F. Randolph. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co. 1894. pp. cxxv, 462. The name '* Eminent Domain " comes from Grotius, and the subject is a prominent one with European writers on public law ; but treatises about it do not exist outside of the United States. The topic develops here because it is a branch of our system of Constitutional I^w. The first treatise was by H. E. Mills, of St. Louis, in 1879; of this a second edition appeared in 1888. In the last named year there came another much larger book, by John Lewis, of Chicago. The subject had been systematically dealt with in two elaborate articles, published in 1856, in Volume XIX. of the Boston Law Reporter; and of course it is often nowa- days incidentally expounded in works on other subjects, — e. g. in Pierce's American Railroad Law and Angell and Ames on Corporations. Mr. Randolph's book brings the subject well up to the present date. It is a compact, accurate, and scholarly piece of work. The author is no party to that widespread silent conspiracy between writers and pub- lishers which palms off upon an abused profession so much worthless matter. There is no padding here ; the writer has thought over his mat- ter, and his thinking is his own. He has furnished his reader also with an unusually good apparatus of helps in his full indexes, his careful syllabus of the entire volume, and a collection of all the constitutional passages relating to his subject. While the book is smaller than that of Mills, it his a more thorough and scholarly treatment of the subject. In avoiding the wholly unnecessary bulk of Lewis's treatise, it steers clear also of the narrow, doctrinaire tone which did much to mar that book, — • e. g. in its treatment of the topics of " Public Use " and " Taking." It may well ht thought that Mr. Randolph carries too far the effort to widen the reach of the constitutional provisions, and excepts too readily the smoothly transmitted dicta of judges who in many cases have not sufficiently con- sidered the nature and origin of the great topic they have in hand. But in this he has the example of his two predecessors. Both he and they may perhaps say that they are not making law, but only recording the law ascertained by the courts ; yet one has only to recall the subtle skill of Blackburn in his treatise on Sale to perceive how much an author may do by a wise selection, analysis, and interpretation of the cases, and a close restriction of them to the exact point decided, towards placing the law upon abetter footing. "Legislation," says our author of a certain topic, " both constitutional and statutory, has cleared or confused the situation according to the amount of legal sense behind it." He would probably think it unbecoming to say of judicial decisions what he says here of legislation ; and yet as to many topics that thing ought to be plainly said. Many of the decisions on the subject of Eminent Domain are ill instructed and petty. To say that they declare the law for their own jurisdiction is to say much, when one is inquiring what the momentary law in that juris- diction is ; but it is to say comparatively little when the question is of that larger sort that concerns the jurist, and the lawyer who seeks to set his own feet on the rock of right principles and sound reason and to help place his subject there. Mr. Randolph has fourteen chapters, treating successively of, I. The
