THE NEW YORK 185 630 LEAUX AND T" ON FOUNDATIONS. Cambridge: PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. PREFACE. σ THE HE increased attention which, of recent years, has been bestowed, both in England and in the United States, upon the methods of legal education, has caused a fuller recognition of the great value which case-law possesses for even the elementary student. Only by means of concrete cases can he give vividness and reality to the abstract principles which he learns from his text-books, or even form a clear idea of the way in which questions, whether of law or of fact, are handled in everyday practice by our courts of justice. But, valuable though this part of his legal training is, it is the part in which he most needs direction. Elementary students who read the Reports under their own guidance are prone to reverse the true order of things, by attending to the names of cases rather than to their facts, and to the facts rather than to the principles decided. Even when the principle itself is sought for, it is too often sought only by the compendious method of perusing nothing of the case beyond the head note; a plan of study which combines the disadvantages of reading case-law with those of reading text-books. And even a student whose greater assiduity has saved him from these errors is often led, by a natural inclination for reading recent cases in preference to older ones, to waste his time upon the study of decisions that are concerned only with some refined limitation of a fundamental doctrine, when he has not yet become acquainted with the cases in which that broad doctrine itself is established. Stevens, K. b These facts have often been forced upon my attention in the course of twenty-five years' experience as a law-lecturer at Cambridge; an experience which has also afforded me opportunities of observing what portions of our case-law are best adapted to arouse the attention and impress the memory of students in their early days of difficulty, when legal phrases and principles have not yet ceased to be unfamiliar and uninviting. In order to obtain such cases, I have gone to a variety of sources; not limiting myself to the decisions of the Courts of Criminal Appeal, or to modern decisions, or even to English ones. I have preferred short cases; any longer ones I have usually abridged. To beginners, at any rate, I hope the volume will be of service in affording brief and vivid illustrations of the practical working of the English Criminal Law. The compilation of the book would have been impossible. but for the permission which the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting generously conceded to me, to make use of their Reports; a permission for which my most cordial thanks are due. I must also thank the proprietors of the copyright of Mr Cox's Criminal Law Reports, for allowing me to take several cases from their series. To my friend and former pupil, Mr W. C. A. Landon, of Gray's Inn, I am indebted for assiduous assistance in preparing the volume and carrying it through the press. And to the kindness of Professor Maitland I owe the admirable English rendering in which the cases cited here from the Year Books-except one or two added by myself after he had gone abroad-are made acceptable to modern eyes. DOWNING COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. |