Harvard Law Review Volume 11 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: these results. It may be necessary to add, however, that there is no intention of suggesting the notion that the development of the pledge-idea might a priori have been expected to be the same in all systems, or that for any other legal idea the form or the expedients or the progress must be or is likely to be identical among various peoples. On the contrary, the point of view, in the comparative study of legal ideas, is rather, assuming nothing beforehand, to ascertain exactly what forms and expedients were employed for the specific purpose in question, to note the likenesses and the differences, and to learn how far the differences and contrarieties ? great or small, radical or superficial ? are explainable by the differing conditions of national life. John H. Wigmore. Northwestern University Law School, Chicago. SOME PROBLEMS IN OVERDUE PAPER.1 PERHAPS in no branch of their jurisprudence have the learned judges of a race that is pre-eminent for its commercial instincts and its facile ingenuity in devising simple and accurate business methods, wandered so far astray from the logical development of fundamental principles as they have in their adjudications on questions of mercantile law, which at this day have intrinsically neither in themselves nor from the custom of merchants any apparent legal difficulty. Lord Mansfield, in his wise desire that the principles of commercial law should subserve and be consistent with mercantile usage, placed the foundations of this branch of the Common Law upon broad and solid bases. But the new questions which have arisen since his time for the most part have not been developed or settled upon any logical deduction from the previously established legal principles. Excrescences upon well recognized legal doctrines and inexplicable confu...