Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by

FRANK T. REID & Co.

In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

LIBRARY OF THE

LELAND STANT SKS, JR., UNIVERSITY

LAW DEPARTMENT.

THE enforced leisure of a prolonged trip to Europe led the writer to make some notes in relation to the judicial systems of England and France during the years 1863-4, the judges and lawyers, the modes of legal procedure, and the causes celebres of the period. It may be that some of these notes may instruct the younger members of the profession, and some of them amuse the reader. They are presented as they were made, and may, in some respects, appear a little antiquated, in view of recent events. To recast them, however, would be to destroy their verisimilitude, and take away what little life they may possess. If the reader can fancy Lord Palmerston alive and wielding the destinies of England; if he can imagine Napoleon III on the throne of France, and apparently the mightiest monarch of Europe; if he can picture Bismarck as planning the absorption of Schlesweig-Holstein and the conquest of the German democrats; if he can think of the venerable Pontiff of Rome as contemplating the enunciation of a new dogma of faith, and uttering an orthodox Bull against the errors and evils of human progress; if he can call up the "blood-boltered ghost" of the late tremendous unpleasantness, he will appreciate the period as anything but a common one, and that a spectator would find it rather dull to turn from such stirring panoramas to the "Hall of the Lost Footsteps" of Paris, and the narrow precincts of Lincoln's Inn, or the dingy courts of Westminster. The force of habit was more powerful than the ways of the hour, and many of the writer's pleasantest days were VOL. II-NO. I-1.

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spent in gathering legal lore from under the square caps of the French advocates, and the ridiculous wigs of the English judges and lawyers. The caps, the wigs, and the gowns, were soon lost sight of in the brilliant displays of forensic debate, and the luminous expositions of legal principles from the Bench.

A careful historic survey of the English and French systems of law, in their parallelisms and their divergencies at various periods, would be curious and interesting. There can be no doubt that they were very much the same first under the Roman domination, and again under the Feudal system. We have, in a late number of this REVIEW, traced the civil law through its various stages until it culminated in the Codes of Justinian. No doubt the benefits of the existing system were carried with the conquering legions to the western ocean, to be, after the lapse of ages, replaced by another better adapted for the time to the rude tribes by whom the old Italian civilization had been overwhelmed.

The courts in which feudal justice was administered were presided over by the feudal chiefs, but were composed of their vassals who exercised jurisdiction with their Lords. Each barony had two courts for the trial of civil causes, the court-baron at which the freeholders attended, and the copyhold court of the customary tenants. There was a third court, the court-leet, for criminal and police cases, which was attended by all the inhabitants. The proceedings in this court were in the nature of a grand inquisition, the people not only finding presentments against offenders, but acquitting or convicting the persons charged upon evidence of their own body. In process of time, the general attendance of all the inhabitants became irksome or impossible, and the usage was adopted of calling together only a select number from the body of the country, and these were the jurors who first acted upon their own knowledge, afterwards upon other evidence, and whose powers gradually died away, except in England. Subsequently, as the authority of the Crown increased, courts of high or general jurisdiction were established by the Sovereign for the supervision of the baronial courts, an appeal lying to the King in Parliament. These courts were at first temporary and ambulatory, appointed for special purposes and particular localities. The proceedings of one of these high commissions have been graphically delineated by the pen of one who afterwards became distinguished in the Catholic church. Les Grands Jours D'Auvergne, of Flechier, is a legal curiosity, and gives us a singular insight into provincial French manners during the reign of Louis XIV, and