objection to allowing in such cases some compensation for the indignity suffered, or the shock to the feeling, looking upon such mental suffering as being the immediate and necessary consequence of the actual physical injury, limiting, however, such damages to a certain amount in proportion to the actual damage.

As the doctrine of punitive or vindictive damages has sprung from judge-made law, it is not perceived why the judges cannot unmake it. There is nothing to prevent the doing away with it by statutes, providing that in no case punitive damages should be allowed, but that the plaintiff should only recover just compensation for the injury he has received, including such damages as may immediately and directly flow from the infliction of the injury. The principle for which I contend is briefly this: That damages should be a recompense to the sufferer, and not a punishment of the offender; that the interest of the aggrieved should not be blended with the interests of society.

That the doctrine of punitive damages, coupled with that of respondeat superior-the latter carried, as it is both in England and this country, to such an extent that the employer is liable for the wrongful acts of his employés, although he may have selected them with the greatest care, and may have given them the most proper and minute instructions in regard to their duties-has had a most injurious effect upon our profession. I do not hesitate to

positively affirm that fifty years ago a certain class of practitioners had to live almost exclusively on actions of libel, slander, assault and battery, and the few cases of stage and other accidents. But now, when the locomotive thunders day and night over a hundred thousand miles of track; when our cities, both large and small, teem with all sorts of machinery; when steamboats constantly plough our rivers and lakes, the chapter of accidents is unfortunately endless. Corporations

or wealthy private persons being usually held responsible for all these accidents, there is a rich harvest offered to a certain class of the legal fraternity.

There is no need of multiplying words. Actions sounding in damages, where large verdicts are the price to be obtained, almost with proof, by a stereotyped speech fluently delivered, have always had a tendency to lower the profession, and at the present time, owing to the large crop of such suits, have demoralized it to a very great extent. Punish criminal negligence and willful tortious conduct by fines and imprisonment, and abolish punitive damages in civil suits, and a very large and daily increasing class of lawyers, who disgrace our noble calling, will find their occupation gone, to the great benefit of the profession and the community at large. Such suits, from their very nature, produce those gambling contracts, where the compensation depends entirely and exclusively upon success-a species of stipulations, denounced at all times, either by the law or by honorable custom, and holding out great temptations to weak members of the profession, inducing them to resort to all sorts of means to obtain a verdict.

In Great Britain, and even in our federal courts, the danger of unrighteous verdicts is not so great, because there the judges, by their instructions on the whole case, exercise a most wholesome influence over juries, and do not shrink from setting aside unjust verdicts. But it is quite different in many states, where, from the fact of the judiciary being elective, too many judges have an eye on the popular vote, and are in most states not permitted to instruct at large. But the doctrine which has been briefly discussed is, as I stated before, wrong in principle, and the time will surely come when it will be reconsidered and abolished, or at least greatly modified.

PAPER

READ BY

U. M. ROSE.

Titles of Statutes.

In selecting as the subject of this paper that of the Titles of Statutes, I have been mainly influenced by two considerations: 1. The subject seems to have received but little attention, being usually dismissed by our text writers with a dubious and slighting paragraph or two. 2. The topic is extremely well defined, and may therefore, as I take it, be not improperly chosen as an example of that natural process by which legal principles have their birth, and gradually ripen into rules of practical utility, nowise foreseen in their earlier stages. In very many cases a large part of this process is lost, like the geological formations, in the night of time; and in such cases we can only judge of the remote part by what has occurred within the historic period. But in the case of the subject that I have chosen, the entire transformation or evolution lies within the limits of modern research singularly free from complication with any neighboring matter.

To the uninitiated, every science must largely appear as a collection of arbitrary rules. Such is especially the popular conception of the law; but those who carefully trace its history and gradual development attain to the important fact that law, in its highest sense, like all other sciences, is

not made by man, but is only discovered by him, having its origin and growth in necessities and aspirations, inherent in his surroundings and in himself, and over which he has only a very partial control. It is this fact that lends to the law in the eyes of its devotee its paramount interest. He perceives in it a fabric elaborated from all the materials of human knowledge and research, building the most remote ages in one, so enriched with the experience of all time, so intimately connected with all of the enjoyments, events, and duties of life as to enable him to realize the fine conception of antiquity, that there is nothing which relates to humanity that concerns him not.

But it is not my intention to dwell at this time on the advantages to be derived from the study of the law in its historical aspects, but rather to seek to apply that method, as consistently as may be, to one of the simplest of legal topics.

It is of course well known to you all that, until within a comparatively recent period, the title of a statute was only a name, having no further significance than a mark of identification, and that at present such titles have acquired a fixed place in the constitutional law of a large majority of the American states.

To a casual observer, nothing might seem more arbitrary, or even capricious, than such a result; but a very brief review will serve to show that it is the orderly outgrowth of natural causes of the most lasting character, and wholly inseparable from the conditions in which they take their rise.

Lord Coke commends certain statutes for being shortly penned; and says that "it was the wisdom of ancient parliaments to comprehend much matter in few words."

Another characteristic might be referred to as serving to distinguish the old statutes mentioned. They had no titles; for it

* 2 Inst. 306, 401.

is said that the title of an act is but a new usage, dating from about the 11th Henry VII.* At first the title was usually framed by the clerk of that house in which the bill first passed, and it was seldom read more than once. Being commonly written in red ink, these titles were for a time called rubrics,t

Evidence might be adduced to show either that the clerks were somewhat careless in the discharge of this duty, or that they did not conceive any necessary connection as existing between the contents of a statute and the title or name by which it was to be called.

At any rate, it is clear that the courts could not rely upon a title thus affixed by a mere ministerial officer as affording any evidence of what the legislature meant. For the purposes of interpretation, the clerk had no special advantages over those possessed by the courts; he was also without judicial training, and without the salutary influence derived from the responsibility attached to the judicial office.

After the practice had changed, and when titles had come to be affixed to bills in the way that is customary at the present time, the courts continued to disregard them as means of interpretation. Chief Justice Holt said:

"It is true that the title of an act of Parliament is no part of the law or enacting part, no more than the title of a book is part of the book; for the title is not the law, but the name or description given to it by the makers."‡

This comparison of the title of an act with the name of a book was perhaps more forcible at the time it was made than it would be now; for in the time of Lord Holt the fashion of giving conceited and far-fetched titles to books

* 1 W. Blackst. 95.

Poulter's Case, 11 Rep. 29.

Mills vs. Wilkins, 6 Mod. 62.