480
THE GREEN BAG
notice of the company or of its acting operator, the exercise of reasonable care to transmit genuine and authorized messages only, requires the party who receives the notice to investigate and as certain the authority of the sender before trans mitting the message, or to communicate the facts and circumstances and the inquiry or suspicion to the addressee at or before its delivery. PRACTICE. (Examination of Jurors —• Per sonal Injury Litigation.) .Minn. — With reference to the propriety of interrogating jurors in a per sonal injury case as to their connection with employers' indemnity insurance companies, the Minnesota court takes issue with some of the other states by holding that such questions are entirely proper, and that conduct of counsel having a ten dency to impress the jurors with a belief that the action is being defended by an insurance company is not prejudicial. In Antletz v. Smith, 106 N.W. 517, counsel for plaintiff not only asked each of the first three jurors "-whether he was in any way in terested in an accident insurance company," but on the calling of the fourth juror turned to defend ant's attorney and said, " What is the name of the insurance company defending this case?" Some question as to the identity of the real defendant was further interjected by remarks with reference to the right of the defendant's attorney to appear for the defense. Objections to these remarks as well as to the question of defendant's counsel was sustained, and the court holds that under the cir cumstances, and in view of the prior holding in Spoonick t'. Backus-Brooks Co., 94 N. W. 1079. neither the questions to the jurors nor the remarks of plaintiff's counsel were cause for reversal. PROPERTY. (Prescription — Easements.) Aus tralia. — The case of Delohery v. Permanent Trustee Co. of New South Wales, i Common wealth Law Reports, 283, decided, as regards three of the states, viz. Victoria, Queensland, and New South Wales, that prescription at common law, as it affects ancient lights, has been applicable in Australia since the beginning of settlement. It has also kept, alive the weatherbeaten legal fiction of " lost grant," to sustain individual claims based upon inaction by the other party, a rather too tech nical device to meet difficulties caused by modern conditions. The plaintiff sought to restrain the defendant from building, so as to obstruct the light enjoyed by the premises of the former, on the ground that the English law of ancient lights, based upon long uses or prescriptions, was in force in New South Wales, although the English Statute, 2 and 3 Wm. IV, chap. 7, had not been adopted nor copied in the state. This, the English Prescriptions Act, was passed in 1832, four years
after New South Wales had been given power to legislate for her needs, and so was not in force in the colony. By 9 Geo. IV, chap. 83, passed in 1828, giving this power to the colony, it was de clared that the common law of England should be in force in the colony, and not a little of the time of Australian judges has since been spent in the endeavor to decide what parts of the English com mon law have been applicable to the conditions of the new world. This act made clear the doctrine that colonists take with them on settling in a new country the laws of the motherland. Although the conditions in Australia on settlement were not similar to those in England at the same date, the high court held that the right of a person to the enjoyment of light which had come uninterrupt edly to his building for the space of twenty years was a right universally sound in principle, and not based merely on local conditions where declared. The term of twenty years upon which to establish the right of " ancient lights" had been determined by the common law of England by 1828, and so it must be taken to be in force in that part of Aus tralia which formed New South Wales at that date. The present states of Queensland, New South Wales, and Victoria have been carved from the original colony of the New South Wales of eighty years ago. In the court of first instance, from which appeal has been had to the high court, the learned judge held that the doctrine of " lost grant " would not be beneficial in Australia, and that in consequence the law of " ancient lights" was not now applicable in New South Wales. A fortiori, such a doctrine could not by any stretch of the imagination have been in force in Australia or applicable on settlement by the first colonists. A legal fiction assuming such a condition of things as could sustain a grant of easements for twenty years would be an absurdity in an uncivilized country on the day on which it was taken posses sion of by England. But as the high court ap parently considered that a title by user for twenty years a universal right of property based upon primary principles, it reversed the decision of the court below. Yet while it so decided it declared that " the foundation, however, of the plaintiff's right being a grant or agreement on the part of the owner of the adjoining land, using those terms in the sense, not of an actual document which has been lost, but in the sense of a contractual obliga tion which is implied by law from admitted facts, it is of course still open to the defendants to show such a state of facts as will exclude the implica tion." The doctrine that first colonists take with them the common law of the motherland, applicable to the conditions of the new country settled by them, is qualified by the judgment of the high court
