Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 9.djvu/382

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HARVARD LAW REVIEW.
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354 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. passenger made his contract with the ticket agent and the ticket was handed over merely as a receipt, then he would perhaps have had a contract right to be carried to his intended destination. But, as was pointed out in i Har- vard Law Review, 17, the ticket agent has no authority to make contracts, — his duty is merely to sell tickets. The ticket is the contract, and by its terms the passenger is bound ; and in a case like that under discussion, while he doubtless has a right of action against the company for selling him the wrong contract, he has no action for being put off the train at the terminus provided by that contract. Courts have fallen into error, it would appear, from failure to distinguish between the case of a ticket which is, on its face, not good for the journey intended by the passenger, and that of a ticket which is apparently good for the intended journey, and declared to be so by the ticket agent, although by the regulations of the company it is in fact not good. In the latter case the contract is ambiguous, and the passenger, under the circumstances, surely has a right to insist on the interpretation given by the company's agent ; but that is no reason why he is not bound by the ticket in the former case, where the interpretation of the contract is perfectly clear. (See Hutchinson on Carriers, § 580,/) The analogy between railroad tickets and bills and notes has often been remarked, and is treated of at length in the article in the Harvard Law Review referred to above. A ticket is not a consensual but a formal con- tract ; and although assignable in the absence of words of limitation, it is, like other negotiable instruments, not assignable in part. The second of the two recent cases is of note in this connection. In Curlaftder v. Fullmati Palace Car Co., a case decided in the Superior Court of Baltimore, and re- ported in 28 Chicago Legal News, 68, the novel question was raised as to the right of a purchaser of a sleeping car section, who leaves the train before reaching his destination, to transfer the use of the section to another passen- ger for the rest of the journey. The court held that he had that right. This decision can apparently be supported only on the ground that a sleeping car ticket is radically different from a railroad ticket ; that it is not a formal con- tract of transportation, but rather evidence of the purchase of certain space in the sleeping car for the specified journey. The existence of so marked a distinction between the two sorts of ticket may well be doubted. The Right to Privacy — The Schuyler Injunction. — The case of Schuyler v. Curtis, before noticed in its earliest stage in 5 Harvard Law Review, 148, has been finally adjudicated by the Court of Appeals of New York in favor of the defendant. The bill was for an injunction to prevent the defendants from completing a statue of a deceased lady of whom the plaintiff was the nephew and step-son, and from displaying it first at the World's Fair under the title of " The Typical Philanthropist," and then in the rooms of the Ladies' Art Association in New York, Mr. Justice Peck- ham in dismissing the bill took especial care to say that the decision could not be taken as a denial of the right to privacy, or of that altogether inde- pendent right which the next of kin of a deceased person might have in the privacy of that person's past life, and he put the decision upon the ground that in the case in question there were no circumstances which gave the plaintiff good reason to pray for an injunction. The reasoning was that the deceased could not have shrunk from the anticipation of a publicity after her