Suchergebnisse

The protective and friendly attitude with which the courts and legislatures have viewed charities is reflected in the rule of nonliability for torts committed by such eleemosynary institutions. The rationales for this exemption may be briefly classified into five main groups. The first and most all inclusive, is the trust fund doctrine based on an early English case and exemplified by the Massachusetts decisions. Under this theory a charitable institution can not be held liable for the negligence of servants and employees or administrative officials.Nor is the court concerned with the status of the plaintiff as beneficiary, employee or stranger. The trust fund can not be diverted from the charitable purposes for which it was intended to compensate for one injured in the execution of these duties.

Of no small proportions was the task faced by the judges of this state when the legislature saw fit to superunpose upon our background of common law a system of community property, a development of the civil law And nowhere are the difficulties of reconciling these two conflicting systems felt more acutely than in the field of tort liability. In addition to inherent difficulties there is the urge which constantly influences judges to circumvent existing law when it requires turning away a just claimant empty-handed (or, what amounts to the same thing, turning hun away with a judgment winch cannot be satisfied). This urge is, often buttressed by a strong public policy in favor of protectmg the class of claimants to which the plaintiff belongs. Little wonder then that the decisions in this field do not always preserve inviolate the "symmetry" of the "edifice of justice."

On August 18/31, 19.07, the Governments of Great Britain and Russia entered into the following agreement:
His Majesty the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Emperor of India, and His Majesty the Emperor of All the Eussias, animated by the sincere desire to settle by mutual agreement different questions concerning the interest of their States on the Continent of Asia, have determined to conclude Agreements destined to prevent all cause of misunderstanding between Great Britain and Eussia in regard to the questions referred to, and have nominated for this purpose their respective plenipotentiaries, to wit:His Majesty the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Emperor of India, the Eight Honourable Sir Arthur Nicolson, His Majesty's Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipoteniary to His Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias;His Majesty the Emperor of All the Eussias, the Master of his Court Alexander Iswolsky, Minister for Foreign Affairs;

It is not too much to say that the municipal law of every civilized state
recognizes certain rights as belonging to every individual, including the right to property, the violation of which constitutes a tort. Municipal law also very generally recognizes certain duties as attached to every individual the breach of which, coupled with consequent damages to another, is a tort. Thus, a tort is sometimes defined as a private or civil wrong or injury, and sometimes as the breach of a legal duty.

In the course of the last fifty-five years the countries of the Western Hemisphere have developed effective instruments and procedures for cooperative action in many fields of common interest. There is, in the first place, the official governmental machinery for hemispheric cooperation—the Inter- American system—which operates through thirty permanent agencies. There are, furthermore, some thirty-nine semi-official and private agencies (Inter-American, Caribbean, Latin American, and South American regional, as well as bipartite) which have been established in response to recommendations of general or special Inter-American conferences, under the auspices of the government of some one American state, or by private initiative. And, finally, there are seventeen official agencies created by joint action of two states to deal with problems of special interest to them. In all, there are now eighty-six international agencies in the Americas, over half of them governmental. An adequate presentation of this very extensive machinery for collaboration would exceed the scope of an article. We shall only attempt here to show the variety of common interests now served by international agencies in the Western Hemisphere. Of necessity, the description of individual agencies must be rather sketchy but detailed information concerning the history, purposes, internal administration, and accomplishments of all agencies here mentioned may be found in a volume which has just been published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The organization of the American Law Institute on February 23, 1923, represents the first, and so far the only general, effort of the profession to do something about the state of the law and to safeguard the legal system for the future. Itself an outgrowth of a voluntary committee headed by Elihu Root for the Establishment of a Permanent Organization for the Improvement of the Law, the Institute was a response to a situation of growing seriousness which threatened the survival of the common law. Faced bv an ever increasing volume of the decisions of the courts, which already numbered over one and three-quarter million reported cases, with that staggering total growing at the rate of more than twenty-five thousand a year, the Institute recognized that unless a new factor promoting certainty and clarity could be found to blaze a path through the labryinth of often irreconcilable decisions a forced abandonment of our common law system of expressing and developing law through judicial application of existing rules to new fact combinations would be necessary, its place to be taken by rigid legislative codes. It was in an attempt to supply this factor that the Institute's restatements of the law were begun. Restatements of the law of Contracts, Agency, and Conflict of Laws have already appeared, to this list are now added the first two volumes of the Restatement of Torts.