Law as a Process of Decision: A Policy-Oriented Approach to Legal Study

It may be seen, if we address ourselves to certain fundamentals, that those who are just beginning the study of law and those who are in mid-passage, or growing old, share a common, continuous responsibility for achieving conceptions of law and of legal study adequate to the crises of our time. For appropriate perspective, let us first reflect for a moment upon the social role of the legal profession. Perhaps the best way in brief to describe the distinctive role of the lawyer is to say that he is an especially skilled expert in the use of authoritative language and authoritative procedures for affecting or influencing decisions. Some freshman law students will, thus, if they follow in the footsteps of their predecessors, themselves become government officials, making decisions in the name of authoritative community expectation and with community coercion behind them. They will, for example, become senators, congressmen, governors, mayors, judges, aldermen, state representatives, delegates to the United Nations, and so on. Others will become the counsellors and advocates, in large and small affairs, of the individuals and groups who seek decisions from such officials. They will become counsel to private business associations, to labor unions, to churches and schools, to political parties and pressure groups, and, in the sum, to all the institutions of our organized community life. Some fifteen years ago Professor Lasswell and I summarized as follows: It should need no emphasis that the lawyer is today, even when not himself a maker of policy, the one indispensable adviser of every responsible policy-maker in our society—whether we speak of a government department or agency, of the executive of a corporation or labor union, of the secretary of a trade or other private association, or even of the humble independent enterpriser or professional man. . . . Certainly it would be difficult to exaggerate either the direct or indirect influence that members of the legal profession exert on the public life of this nation. For better or worse our decision-makers and our lawyers are bound together in a relation of dependence or of identity

Title Registration and Land Law Reform: A Reply

Writing under the somewhat question-begging title of The Resurrection of Title Registration in the April, 1940, issue of this Review, Professor Percy Bordwell, dean of American property law teachers, seeks to condemn, albeit in a half-hearted and ambiguous way, that method of keeping the public books about land which has popularly come to be known as the Torrens System. Largely an answer to certain uncompromising criticisms of Professor Richard B. Powell\u27s earlier condemnation of that system in his Registration of the Title to Land in the State of New York, Professor Bordwell\u27s article is so temperate in tone and so speciously reasonable, with its generous concessions, that a reader unfamiliar with the problem may miss its paradoxical quality and the utter inconclusiveness of its argument. The burden of Professor Bordwell\u27s complaint is several-fold. The advocates of title registration, he asserts, have largely assumed its manifest superiority over prevalent systems of recording. To explain away the outstanding fact of the ineffectiveness, the failure, of voluntary registration in this country and England they have harped upon the self-interest of solicitors and abstracters and title insurance companies and have adopted a Satanic interpretation of history which does not get us anywhere. Experience in the Anglo-American countries demonstrates that registration must be made compulsory to amount to anything. But why make it compulsory? Why all this fuss about title registration? There has been no such conspicuous failure of the recording system or of title insurance as to discredit either. Title registration cannot make land liquid and as easily transferable as a ship or a share of stock or an automobile ; such extravagant hopes are but a reflection of the fight for free trade in land in England. No millennium will be wrought by a register of title. Registration, being unsuitable for multiple interests, might, however—strange as it may seem—imperil our historic law of estates and future interests; the scrapping of such interests was a by-product (also the most outstanding feat ) of the struggle for registration in England. The important thing to bear in mind is that the logic of registration of title is a revolution in our land law. Finally, we have one system of public transfers already; why supplant it with another which may raise constitutional and personnel difficulties and produce a lack of coherence and uniformity in the common law throughout the country ? The Torrens System is a foreign system. Regardless of the conclusiveness of the certificate, of the desirability of cutting off stale claims and of the modem tendency to look to the state, the case for it is not made out

Third-Party Decision

Mr. President, distinguished delegates, and fellow observers: It is a great honor and pleasure to be permitted to be an observer at this tenth session of the Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee. Mr. Oscar Schachter, the President of the American Society of International Law, has asked me to express his deep appreciation of your courtesy in allowing us to be present here, and I should like to add my own warm thanks. For more than two years the American Society of International Law has had a special committee, of which I have been a member, studying this draft convention upon the law of treaties and making recommendations to the United States Delegation to the Vienna Conference. It was my privilege also to be a member of the United States Delegation to the first Vienna Conference. Insofar as possible, however, on this occasion I should like to follow the advice given yesterday by Dr. Nagendra Singh and to try to divest myself of all special identities. I hope, with appropriate humility and with awareness of my position as an observer, simply to speak to you as one human being to another and as a citizen of the larger community of mankind

Jurisdiction

In public and private international law, the word jurisdic­tion - in etymological origin, speaking the law - is used to refer to the competence of a state - the authority of a state as recognized by international decision-makers and by other states - to make law for, and to apply law to, particular events or particular controversies