London Legal Letter. from that of the divorced woman, it was important to determine, in cases where the husband sent a Bill of Divorcement from a distant place to his wife, whether he was still alive when the bill was delivered to her. The presumption was ordinarily in favor of the validity of the divorce; and the question arose, what if the husband was known to have been in danger of his life at the time when he gave the bill to the messenger? "Suppose," once said a disciple to Rabbi Joseph of Pumbaditha, "a man, accused of
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a capital crime and led before a Court of Justice for trial, sends a Bill of Divorcement to his wife, may we presume that he was yet alive when it was delivered? " To which the Rabbi replied, " If the accused is led before a Jewish tribunal, he is presumed to be yet alive when the bill is delivered, for a Jewish tribunal is loath to condemn man to death; but if he is led before a Court of the Heathen (alias, Romans), I should be obliged to decide otherwise, since a man accused before them is as good as dead."
LONDON LEGAL LETTER. London, July 4, 1891. "1 TE are at last attempting to grapple with the
- * subject of legal education. It is noto
rious how far we in the old country are behind you in this matter; singularly enough, although no country has ever produced a more splendid roll of practising lawyers, or for that matter a finer type of the legal practitioner, yet we are nowhere in the sphere of formal instruction in law. This arises partly from our virtues, partly from our faults. We venerate the actual; we like to see legal principle in every-day operation; we weary of the mists and vapors which hang round the original springs in the uplands of his tory. Your readers are no doubt more or less familiar with the mode of becoming an English barrister; every one has smiled at our eating of dinners, our not too embarrassing examinations. A smaller number, however, are aware that for a good many years there has been in existence a system of law lectures delivered in the various Inns of Court by competent authorities on all the main branches of the science, including of course Roman, Constitutional, and International Law, and Jurisprudence. The flaw in the scheme was that, attendance not being compulsory, very few students ever went to the lectures at all. These in structions exerted not the slightest influence on the education of the professsion. The system has for long been admitted to be unsatisfactory, but it is only quite recently that the Benchers of the Inns of Court have brought
their deliberations to a practical conclusion. It is now proposed to inaugurate a fully organized scheme of legal instruction; there are to be Pro fessors, Readers, and Tutors, the scope of the in structions will be enlarged, and I gather that students in the future will be required, or at least find it necessary, to attend the prelections. Lord Justice Lindley and Mr. Justice Matthew have identified themselves prominently with the move ment for a higher standard of legal education. Nothing beyond the outlines of the scheme has at present become known; but such as they are they have met with very general approval. The case of the Bishop of Lincoln, which is at present before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on appeal from the judgment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, continues to ex cite the greatest interest. When the proceedings against the Bishop of Lincoln for alleged ritualis tic practices were commenced in the first instance, an obsolete jurisdiction of the Primate was re vived, in order if possible to meet the objections of the High Church party to a civil tribunal This well-meant effort, however, was only partially successful; High Churchmen, while entertaining the highest respect for the Archiepiscopal Court, declined to regard it as a constitutional tribunal, asserting that the proper court to deal with such matters was one consisting of all the bishops of the province of Canterbury. In the event the Archbishop and his episcopal assessors found for the bishop on every substantial point; in so doing
