REVIEWS
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1940.tb00782.x |
| Published date | 01 April 1941 |
| Date | 01 April 1941 |
REVIEWS
313
in England for the time being on trust that he shall forthwith in
his
absolute discretion devote the same to the furtherance of educational or
charitable or religious purposes for Roman Catholics in the British Empire
in such manner in all respects
as
he may think
fit.”
The perhaps less
manifest intcntion of this bequest too has been sacrificed to the narrow
rules
of
intcrpretation.
It
was
held that there was no general charitable
intention in the will as
a
whole. There was no doubt that the words
“
educational” and
“
charitable
”
dcfinitely meant
“
charitable
”
in the
legal sense, but the word “religious” in the context of the will could
include purposes which were not within this meaning. A similar case,
Re
Asltton,
IVestminster
Bank
v.
Farley
(1939).
3
All
E.K.,
p.
491.
was
referred to, where the House of Lords held that “for parish work” could
include pdrposes not stiictly charitable.
It
had been argued that the
word “charitable” iii this, the
Ward
will, should be construed in
a
non-
legal sense,
so
that the gift would read “for the purpose of education,
or
for the Ielief of poverty, or for the advancement of religion,” each and
all of which
is
strictly “charitable,” and thus save the
gift.
But the
Master of the Rolls could not agree with this; there was nothing in the
wording of the gift to prevent the Archbishop from applying the property
to some particular activity of the Roman Catholic Church not legally
“charitable”; in his opinion there was
a
deliberate intention to go outside
the legal definition of “charity” and therefore the gift must fail.
It
is
quite time something was done to rectify this state of affairs
whereby many deserving charities-in the layman’s sense-are being
deprived of property manifestly intended for them by testators.
J.
H.
EZARD.
REVIEWS
HISTORICAL
INTRODUCTION
TO
THE
THEORY
OF
LAW.
By
J.
WALTER
JONES.
Oxford Clarendon Press,
1940.
16s.
net.
Mr. Jones has boldly and successfully ventured into
a
field hitherto
badly neglected in English, although much less in American Jurisprudence.
Fortunately, the days are over when Jurisprudence meant, to the English
student of law, some knowledge of Austin and Salmond, plus, perhaps, a
little Gray and Pollock, and anything beyond that was either “meta-
physical,” “continental,” “philosophical,” or something similar and
certainly objectionable. Slowly. very slowly, the conviction
is
gaining
ground that legal theory
is
not only
a
vital part of legal education, but
that
it
confronts the practical lawyer, judge, administrator, adviser, no
less than the legislator, in the course of their work.
Mr. Jones’s book is, therefore, doubly welcome:
as
a
systematic con-
tribution to
a
part of jurisprudence which badly needs exploring, and
as
a
very scholarly and attractively written study of
a
number of important
legal theories. The field
of
legal theory
is,
of
course,
so
immense that
a
book of
300
pages can only pick out some aspects. Mr. Jones calls his
book
an “historical” Introduction.
It
is
not quite clear why; perhaps
because the first, particularly learned, chapter
is
devoted to Roman and
the Medieval Civilians. Apart from that, there
is
nothing particularly
historical about either selection or treatment. From the vast field of legal
theory, Mr. Jones
has
picked out some but by
no
means
all
of
the
more
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