The Lawyers Easy Chair. you succeed in getting a re-nomination, you will be "snowed under" so deep that one of these high hats with its funereal feathers on top of a six-footer woman would be invisible in the drift. You have yet to hear from the people. Men will yank their own hats off every minute to women in the streets, and yield their seats to them in the street-cars, but the high hat is, as Marjorie Fleming said of "seven times seven," "what nature herself can't endure." Women may just as well understand that the worm has turned. Hats off, or no vote. Vox popitli mix vomica'. What says the poet? When lovely woman wears a bonnet That hides the legs upon the stage, What charm can hush man's curses on it, And mitigate his muttered rage? The only art to calm his passion And smooth away his looks adverse, Is to eschew the feathery fashion And sell her plumage for a hearse.
NOTES OF CASES. Judicial Comity. — The late Judge John Erskine, of Atlanta, shortly before his death, wrote us in rela tion to the recent sketch of Charles O'Conor in this magazine. With particular reference to the matter of cumulative sentences, he said : — "When in London in 1880, or possibly 1SS2 (for I was in that city in both those years), I had some business in the Foreign Office, and while there strayed into the Court of Appeal, just as Mr. Benjamin had concluded his argu ment in the Tichborne Claimant case, against cumulative sentences. There were three judges sitting — James Brett (afterward Master of the Rolls), and the other was, I think, Lord Justice Collin. AVhen Mr. Benjamin sat down, the three 'learned Thebans1 conferred for a few minutes, and then Lord Justice James began to talk, and when he came to speak of the New York Court of Appeals case which you refer to, he belabored it with great judicial rigor. 1 cannot recall what he did say, but it was thunderingly expressed, and I knew he would get ' bringer ' when the judgment reached New York. But the next morning I read in 'The Times' a report of the judgment, much softened in language. It read very well, and pleased this old gentleman." When Lord Justice James came to publish his opinion in official form (5 O. 15. Div. 502), he was quite moderate, notwithstanding he was "startled" by the New York decision, in three places, and in another found it "startling if not shocking:" al though it is hard to see why he was surprised, for he confesses that be is "unable to understand it." In the celebrated case of Brook v. Brook, 9 H. S. Cas. 219, which decided the momentous proposition that a man's marriage with his deceased wife's sister,
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made in a country where it was valid, would not be valid in England, the Lord Chancellor Campbell ad ministered a rebuke to Sutton v. Warren, 10 Mete. 451, which held that a marriage between nephew and aunt, contracted where it was legal, would be recog nized as valid in Massachusetts, although it would have been invalid if celebrated in Massachusetts. Lord Campbell said: "I am sorry to say that it lather detracts from the high respect with which I have been in the habit of regarding American deci sions resting upon general jurisprudence"; "pro ceeded on a total misapprehension of the laws of England"; and "My Lords, may alarm us." Would that his lordship could have lived to read Mr. Bishop on Brook v. Brook, and Chief Justice Gray's reply to these animadversions, in Millikin v. Pratt, 13 Mass. 458. The former is too long to cjuote, and the latter observed : — "The judgment proceeds upon the ground that an act of Parliament is not merely an ordinance of man but a con clusive declaration of the law of God. . . Such a decision, upon such reasons, from any tribunal, however eminent, can have no weight in inducing a court not bound by its authority to overrule or disregard its own decisions . . . The case recalls the saying of Lord Holt, in London v. Wood, 12 Mod. 669,687,688, that an act of Parliament can do no wrong, though it may do several things that look pretty odd, and illustrates the effect of narrow views of policy, of the doctrine of 'the omnipotence of Parliament,' and of the consequent unfamiliarity with questions of gen eral jurisprudence upon judges of the greatest vigor of mind and of the profoundest learning in the municipal law and in the forms and usages of the judicial system of their own country." So far it seems that the American courts have made the most "points" in the slugging match. But as Gray's rejoinder came twelve years late, we fear that Campbell did not see it. Divorck — Fraud. — Several recent New York cases seem to run counter to the well-settled doctrine of annulment of the marriage contract on the ground of fraud. It is familiar that fraud which will avoid a marriage must go to the essence of the contract. Fraudulent representations as to birth, age, social position, fortune, health, manners or character, will not suffice. Kent says. " The law makes no pro vision for a blind credulity, however it may have been produced." So where a man represented that his former wife was dead, but she was living, they having been divorced (Clarke -'. Clarke, 11 Abbott Pr. 228); and where a woman concealed the fact that she had given birth to an illegitimate child (Smith v. Smith, 8 Oreg. 100), it was held that the marriage should not be set aside. But in the special term of the New York Superior Court (King v. Brewer, 8 Misc. 587), it has been held that a wife
