Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1875 Excerpt: ...I listen to that preposterous scheme--that laymen should evolve a code for themselves. Such a proposal is no less sagacious than would be the proposition to burn our locomotives and steam-vessels, in order that we might return to horse-power and galleys! Indeed, those mechanisms are far less potent in the economy of material, than are the instruments of the jurisconsult in the economy of mental, labour. Nor can you undertake to furnish a better set of tools than those we already possess. Never was an act of parliament drawn with greater care and rarely by abler hands than those of Sir Matthew Hale, Lord Keeper Guildford, and Sir Leoline Jenkins. "Yet every line of the Statute of Frauds may with truth be said to have cost as well as in the words of the great Earl of Nottingham to have been worth a subsidy" (Smith's Contracts). Take but the 4th and 17th sections and see the enormous bulk to which the determination of their provisions has swelled. Nay, in the 17th section what endless interpretation of the terms "accept" and "receive" in the clause--" unless the buyer shall accept part of the goods so sold and actually receive the same"! How vain, then, to attempt a reconstruction of the language and law of real property! There is, moreover, a very palpable fallacy in deriving an analogy from the success that attended the establishment of the law merchant. Here the layman was successful because he was opening up entirely new ground. The earliest reported case on a bill of exchange is Martin v. Boure, 6 James 1, and it was not till 3 & 4 Anne, c. 9, the negotiability of notes was put beyond question, though these latter had been in circulation ever since the appropriation, by Charles I., of the deposits at the Mint, h...
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