The Legal Important Litigation Circuit Court Judge Burdett, at Charleston, West Va., restrained Attorney-General Conley and County Prosecutors July 24 from enforc ing the two-cent rate law against the Virginian Railroad on the ground that the act limiting the rate was unconstitutional. The state de cided on an appeal. The Supreme Court of Nebraska has de clared the so-called nonpartisan judiciary law unconstitutional. This law prohibited any political party, committee, or convention from "in any way whatsoever endorsing, recom mending, censuring or referring to any candi date" for judicial office. This provision was deemed in violation of the constitutional guarantees of free speech, free assemblage, and free elections. All discrimination is not forbidden by the Act to Regulate Commerce, but only such dis crimination as is undue, was substantially the decision rendered July 13 by the Inter state Commerce Commission in the case of Herbeck-Demer Company v. Baltimore & Ohio R. R. Co. & Pennsylvania R. R. Co. The complainant has traveling salesmen who carry about 1,250 pounds of baggage, on all over 150 pounds of which they nave had to pay excess fare. The commission held that the discrimination cited was not unlawful, and that the railroad had a right to stipulate the amount of baggage to be carried by a passenger on his ticket as personal property. In the opinion of the Treasury Department, litigation will be necessary to settle the status of goods imported on the last day the Dingley tariff rates were effective. The usual hour of closing the customs offices is 4.40 p. m. In some instances the offices were closed at the usual hour; in others they were kept open as late as midnight, on the theory that as the new law would not go into effect until the morning of August 6, the importer should be given possible facility to get their consign ments through the custom house. Protests have been received by the Treasury Depart ment in great numbers against the early closing, but the new duties have been enforced. In a sweeping and important decision made public July 15, the Interstate Commerce Commission condemned the manner in which the leading express companies of the country had been conducting their business. The commission commanded the companies to file with it a new basis of rates for the carriage of small parcels. The companies directly affected are the Adams, United States, American, Pacific, and Wells-Fargo. The Bois6 Com mercial Club brought the complaint, main
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taining that Bois6 and other towns in Idaho were grossly discriminated against because of the lack of competition in such towns. It was shown that a package weighing in excess of seven pounds and less than forty-eight pounds, shipped from New York to Boise, was exorbitantly taxed. An additional tres pass on the Interstate Commerce Law was the rule the companies had formed of charg ing much more for packages on which the rates were to be collected at their destination. The commission said that when a company had a monopoly at the packages' destination the exorbitant rate was applied, but not if there was competition. The commission's ruling found that the conditions under which rates were at present made were "chaotic," and the carriers were ordered to submit a new tariff on or before October 1. After a three weeks trial before Mr. Justice Mills of the Supreme Court of Westchester County, N. Y., Harry K. Thaw, the slayer of Stanford White, was decided on Aug. 12 to be still insane, and was sent back to the asylum at Matteawan. The Court expressed itself as convinced that the facts clearly showed a substantial though not strong heredi tary taint of insanity, a delusion regarding White's practices based on an unalterable belief in the wildest and most impossible stories, and insanity of the kind known as paranoia, and not at all of the so-called "brain storm" variety. The judge presiding at the trial, from his own personal observations and interrogation of Thaw, concluded that he had continued to be of unsound mind, being still subject to the same delusions as when he shot White. In anticipation of a decision unfavorable to his release, Thaw on July 19, three weeks previously, through his counsel, filed in each of the five counties of the ninth judicial district copies of an appeal in the New York Court of Appeals from the recent order of the Brooklyn Appellate Division. In this the court, with the exception of Justice Gaynor, had upheld the action of Justice Mills in dismissing a former writ of habeas corpus, and had ruled that section 454 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, under which Thaw had been originally committed to the asylum, was constitutional (see 21 Green Bag 416). Personal Jay Mertz of Detroit has been appointed to the newly created position of deputy clerk of the Supreme Court of Michigan. He was secretary and stenographer to Chief Justice Carpenter up to the time when the latter resigned a year ago to resume the practice of law in Detroit.
