THE CODIFICATION OF THE FRENCH CUSTOMS

A renewed attack on central problems of English legal history can gain fresh perspective from the history of French law. France and England entered the later middle ages with a common fund of legal and political institutions. Much of the area that was to be included in modern France was united with England under a common sovereign; political institutions were shaped by the same basic forces into similar forms of feudal organization; private law was largely composed of unformulated popular custom, remarkably similar even in detail. As early as the thirteenth century the tendencies toward divergence, both in law and government, had made themselves apparent. But we have even now no connected account of the processes by which this divergence occurred, or of the numerous parallels that persisted in later history. We know the main stages of political development by which in England a feudal monarchy was slowly transformed into a constitutional, parliamentary democracy and in France similar institutions had been molded by the eighteenth century into a centralized, bureaucratic state. As to private law, we know the methods by which the common law was constructed; and in France we know the end result, how six hundred years of continuous development were climaxed by the Napoleonic Code of 1804. The rest of the story must be filled in from scattered sources

ESTOPPEL AND STATUTES OF LIMITATION

Among all the spheres of its activity estoppel probably performs no more useful service than in the alleviation of hardship caused by statutes of limitation. Here as in other places the elements of estoppel and its relations to more basic legal concepts are exceedingly hard to define. At some points its effects on limitation acts could be described in terms of express contract; at other points it merges into fraud ; in general it provides the medium for official expressions of disapproval where civil litigation exceeds the permissible limits of private warfare

EFFECTS OF INFLATION ON PRIVATE CONTRACTS: GERMANY, 1914-1924

The German experience with inflation is unique not only in the magnitude of the ultimate disaster but in the wealth and variety of the record which it left behind. From that experience we may still learn much. The problems presented at successive stages of the German inflation differ in degree but not in kind from those which appear in any major shift in the general level of prices. The devices, legal and economic, for restoring an equilibrium thus destroyed must be essentially the same in any great country organized, as Germany was, for specialized, large-scale production. From a study of the German inflation we can expect to ascertain the point at which economic dislocation will lead to intolerable injustice and force courts of law to intervene. And by the success or failure of the methods used by German courts to meet unforeseen changes in money values we may measure our faith in legal safeguards against the hazards of uncontrolled inflation

George Palmer

A Tribute to George Palme

DURESS THROUGH CIVIL LITIGATION: II

Where litigation has progressed to the stage of a final judgment under which execution is immediately available, the initial obstacles already suggested to relief for duress appear to exist in magnified form. The judgment itself establishes the legitimacy of the original demand. Though the coercion threatened is immediate, it has been supplied by general rules of procedure for the specific purpose of compelling satisfaction. It appears from numerous decisions and is even more frequently assumed that a settlement induced by threat of immediate issuance of execution under a valid, final money judgment cannot be duress, whatever the nature of the assets against which process will operate (land, goods, or debts)

FRAUDULENT CONCEALMENT AND STATUTES OF LIMITATION

In a recent article the writer has discussed a common exception to statutes of limitation - the exception for claims based on undiscovered fraud. It was there pointed out how useful this exception has been made through the wide definition of fraud that is now fully established. By judicial decision fraud has been extended far beyond the field of misrepresentation of fact into the twilight zones of constructive fraud and out toward the open spaces of naked tort. But some boundaries had to be fixed even to the extension of substantive principles by the painless process of definition. There remained important types of wrongdoing, accomplished characteristically in secret, which courts hesitated to describe as fraud and which they refused. to bring within the fraud exception. In these cases the essential reasons for suspension of the statute might exist in equal degree. That is to say, the plaintiff\u27s ignorance of the existence of a claim might in fact prevent the commencement of suit, and at the same time might appear to be excused by the character of the defendant\u27s wrong. It is the purpose of this paper to inquire how far cases of the latter type have been cared for by direct legislation and judicial manipulation of limitation acts

THE GOLD CLAUSE DECISIONS

The gold clause decisions of February 18, 1935, have already taken their place among the great landmarks of American constitutional history. They have given a partial answer to some basic questions of constitutional law. Directly they have disposed of claims amounting to a total of many billions of dollars. But their further implications, both for public and private law, are of even greater magnitude; it may be many years before these wider implications are more fully understood