226
The Green Bag
downstairs and in the Judge's chambers. Argument crystallizes daily into new
decisions; it is a never-ceasing solvent of old decisions. Argument honeycombs
codal twins is not even a loophole of escape. So close is the one clean chiseled crime set to its analogue that the
and undermines the glaciers, dribbles into their inmost recesses, crashes out some day when a pent-up reservoir gives way and floods out its masses of detritus.
merest Assistant District Attorney can reach from one to the other. Short thought otherwise. His title, People a: rel. Short, shows him to be a popular guide, and he knows his glaciers as the
Argument leaves its fantastic traceries
good citizen knows the Law.
everywhere; it covers over the well
heard somewhere that there is some times a Iem'um quid between person and property. A man's job is not his per son, nor is it his property, as has been
holes of the glacier with a seemingly solid crust; it carries you out to destruc tion on the treacherous little bridges it has stretched across the crevasses. Were
it not for argument you would not have the tales of adventure I am about to tell you of the Mauvais Pas of the Written Law." "Proceed, I beg you, my charming Nature-faker!" "I will proceed, and by the Book, viz.
the New York Law Journal. Let us turn to the marvelous eismeer incident of page 1768, January 28, 1911, re ported by the prosaic editor as the Decision of ‘People ex rel. Shortv.Warden'
Short had
settled by judicial determination. Then
why, between the crimes of Extortion by threatening one's neighbor's person and Extortion by threatening his prop erty, is there not the third crime of
Extortion by threatening his job? There ought to be such a crime, said Short,
but knowing the written code, I'll ven ture to say there isn't.
I'll try it and
see. He went up on the glacier, where he thought the gap might be between the two codal Extortions, and tried the ice. It bent beneath him. Suddenly he tripped and stumbled. His foot was
but which I should headline thus: ‘Spe cial Extra. — Another Slip-up on Written Law's Slippery Slopes. — Caught on Ex tortion's Mer de Glace finds New Statu tory Hole and Escapes.’ “Penal Code, sec. 851, relating to Ex tortion, is a characteristic section of our
every direction. He found himself sink ing bodily into a hole or chimney which opened beneath his feet. It was a hole
great codal glacier. Here in a seem ingly solid mass of firm ice are found
would serve an active man to crawl
some thirteen varieties of Extortion loosely thrown together at every con
ceivable angle in crags and ledges (the result of some legislative convulsion) and the whole spread over with the merest crust of verbiage. Two of these ice crags, viz. Extortion by Threat of Injury to Person, and Extortion by
Threat of Injury to Property, had been thought to have practically no crevices between them. Between the towering sides, says Baedeker, of these gloomy
caught in an indictment. Jerking hard age to free under himself his quickly, feet flewtheinloose clouds verbi— in
not so large as a barn door, but still down between the two Extortions. His surmise was right. There was free space between the two codal crags. He clamb ered down the chimney joyfully, reached
terra firma and there rejoined his family and friends. But his adventure is matched by that of Bromwich on the
Mauvais Pas of the Statute of False Registration. “This is reported in the Law Journal of January 27, at page 1739, People v. Bromwich. He was a guide also, and
