Forensic Facts and Fallacies; A Popular Consideration of Some Legal Points and Principles (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: CHAPTER VI. BY-LAWS AND RAILWAY PASSENGERS. It is very easily said, and nobody questions it, that giving and withholding our assent should be regulated by the evidence which things carry with them; and yet we see men are not the better for this rule. What then shall a novice, an enquirer, a stranger do in this case ? I answer, Use his eyes. Locke. By-laws are somewhat in the nature of customs, inasmuch as they are made, not by the legislature or judges, but by the public or rather public bodies. They also resemble customs in being dependent on their reasonableness and certainty for their validity, and consequently afford another illustration of the way in which law is made and of its firstessential, namely reason or common sense. They differ, however, from customs in this important particular, that whereas a custom is a practice adopted by common consent, a by-law is a rule made by virtue of some power or authority. From the public point of view there is also this further difference, that whereas customs exist for the convenience of those who make them, by-laws may be said to be made for the inconvenience of those who do not make them. Considered in the abstract, the subject of by-laws is no doubt an arid and uninviting one; but in the concrete it is full of interest, and comes home in a special way to men's business and bosoms. We shall not attempt to define the term, a matter of considerable difficulty; nor need we consider the different authorities by virtue of which a by-law may be made, nor its etymology with reference to its spelling. It will be sufficient for our purpose to take it as meaning a rule made byvirtue of sufficient authority statutory or otherwise, and to say that the weight of authority is in favour of spelling it by-law and not bye-l...