Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/620

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584
HARVARD LAW REVIEW
584

584 HARVARD LAW REVIEW In the course on International Law there was plenty of material available in the way of case-books and text-books. In the course on Military Law the excellent Manual for Courts-Martial was available to take care of the subject of the law relating to the discipUne of the army. But there was no book available covering the other subjects included in MiUtary Law and the course on War-Time Legislation. Colonel Wigmore, versatile and ready for any emergency, immediately set to work to have a book prepared and, with the aid of Dean Merton L. Ferson, in a very few weeks produced the source- book. What the book purports to do, it does well; it furnishes an abimdance of material for the proposed courses. In it are collected pre-war statutes re- lating to the mihtary organization, and judicial opinions on a variety of mat- ters affecting "military persons and others who have relations with them;" and war-time statutes, regulations and general orders, federal judicial opin- ions and opinions of the Judge Advocate General. The war-time statutes include the principal acts of Congress made necessary by the emergency; the war-time judicial opinions and opinions of the Judge Advocate General deal with a vast variety of subjects from the constitutionality of the Selective Service Law to the compensation for labor of prisoners of war. The range of the material is extremely wide; the arrangement is for the most part chron- ological. Of course no teacher would be cruel enough to take up the subject in the order in which it is presented, nor could he possibly cover all the matter presented; of course it could not have been intended that he should. It would be possible however by a wise selection and arrangement to give a course of considerable interest and perhaps of some value — a course which could not be given without the aid of a book like the sovirce-book. With the signing of the armistice the whole plan fell through and probably nowhere will any course be given based upon the source-book. The book is however available as a useful book of reference. Dramatically it shows how the military prob- lems of peace and the problems of the war were met by Congress, the courts and the War Department. Of especial interest are the opinions of the Judge Advocate General, for only a digest of these is elsewhere published. Austin W. Scott. Commercial Arbitration and the Law. By JiiUus Henry Cohen. D. Apple- ton and Company. 1918. pp. xx, 339. The title of this voliune rather leads one to expect a discussion of the relative merits of arbitration and ordinary Utigation, together with information con- cerning the actual use made of arbitration in various jurisdictions. There is something of this in the first fifty pages. The treatment however is by the way. It is neither complete nor very well arranged. This is probably explained by the fact that the book, according to the preface, is an amplification of a brief filed in a New York case by Mr. Cohen, as amicus curiae, acting at the request of the New York Chamber of Commerce. The only report of that case which has come to the writer's attention is found in 163 N. Y. Supp. 516. It says nothing as to arbitration. Questions of that kind must have been eliminated in the lower court. The main thesis of Mr. Cohen's work seems to be that courts of law should recognize all agreements for arbitration- as valid and enforce them with all the powers at their command. Possibly he goes so far as to believe that courts with equity powers should specifically enforce such agreements. See pages 250, 251, and 274. Of course it is settled law that equity will not specifically enforce them. Probably the best reason for equity's refusal to act is that it would be difficult to supervise the performance of such an intricate proceeding as an arbitration. When Mr. Cohen, on page 251, says that Mr. Justice Story was wrong in his statement that no case supports specific performance of such an