Every person has a privilege * * * in the interests of public justice to put the criminal law in motion against another whom he bona fide, and upon reasonable and probable cause, believes to have been guilty of a crime. * * * It must not, however, be supposed that hatred and ill-will existing in the mind of a prosecutor must of necessity destroy the privilege, for it is not impossible that such hatred and ill-will may have very natural and pardonable reasons for existing. * * *
Applying the term in relation to the subject of property, Mr. Justice Foster, of the Supreme Court of Maine, said in the case of Pulitzer v. Livingston:[1]
It is contrary to the policy of the law that there should be any outstanding titles, estates, or powers, by the existence, operation or exercise of which, at a period of time beyond lives in being and twenty-one years and a fraction thereafter, the complete and unfettered enjoyment of an estate, with all the rights, privileges and powers incident to ownership, should be qualified or impeded.
As a final example in the present connection, the language of Baron Alderson in Hilton v. Eckerley[2] may be noticed:
Prima facie it is the privilege of a trader in a free country, in all matters not contrary to law, to regulate his own mode of carrying them on according to his discretion and choice.[3]
The closest synonym of legal "privilege" seems to be legal "liberty." This is sufficiently indicated by an unusually discriminating and instructive passage in Mr. Justice Cave's opinion in Allen v. Flood:[4]
The personal rights with which we are most familiar are: 1. Rights of reputation; 2. Rights of bodily safety and freedom; 3. Rights of property; or, in other words, rights relating to mind, body and estate, * * * In my subsequent remarks the word "right" will, as far as possible, always be used in the above sense; and it is the more
- ↑ (1896) 89 Me., 359.
- ↑ (1856) 6 E. & B., 47. 74.
- ↑ For other examples of apt use of the term in question, see Borland v Boston (1882), 132 Mass., 89 ("municipal rights, privileges, powers or duties"); Hamilton v. Graham (1871), L. R. 2 H. L. (Sc.), 167, 169, per Hatherley, L. C.; Jones v. De Moss (1911), 151 Ia., 112, 117; Kripp v. Curtis (1886), 71 Cal., 62, 63; Lamer v. Booth (1874), 50 Miss., 411, 413; Weller v. Brown (1911), Cal., ; 117 Pac., 517; Mathews v. People (1903), 202 Ill., 389, 401; Abington v. North Bridgewater (1840), 23 Pick., 170.
- ↑ (1898) A. C., 1, 29.
