EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT conveyance of land or of any interest in land is usually ineffective unless it is registered in the country of the situs. A court of equity cannot decree such registry; and therefore it cannot through its jurisdiction over the owner of land in such a country exercise any con trol over the title to the land. . . . "The principles regulating trusts of mov ables are more complex but more restricted. No case has been found, and probably none exists or is likely to be decided, where a court has attempted to find grounds for ordering a conveyance of foreign movables, not the pro ceeds of foreign land, on the ground merely of fraud or breach of contract. We have to consider only cases of express trust. . . . "As to a trust of movables created by will, there is no doubt that its validity must be tested in the first instance by the law of the testator's domicile. If valid by that law, it will be recognized and enforced every where. . . . "The validity of trusts created in a settle ment inter vivos is not so clear a question. Older writers on the conflict of laws, alleging a maxim mobilia sequuntur personam, laid it down that the law of movables was the law of the domicile of the owner. But this fictitious doctrine has been practically aban doned in modern times so far as tangible mov ables are concerned, and the rule which is in consonance with reason has been accepted; that the validity of a transfer of chattels depends on their situs at the time of transfer. In accordance with this doctrine it seems to be held that validity of a trust in tangible movables depends on the law of their situs at the time the trust settlement was made." The paper concludes with a discussion of what law governs the administration of a trust. EVIDENCE (Similar Acts). " Perhaps the most difficult branch of the law of evidence is that which comprises the exceptions to the rule excluding proof of similar acts from the evidence which may be adduced against an accused person," says Ernest E. Williams, in the January Law Quarterly Review (V. xxiii, p. 28), in an article on " Evidence to Show Intent." A most difficult case in the court for Crown Cases Reserved, Rex v. Bond,
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required decision on the admissibility of a prior act or acts of a similar nature to show the intent with which a prisoner committed the act charged. The charge was abortion on a girl, whom the prisoner, who was a doctor, had seduced. The defense was that the instru ments were used for a lawful purpose, to cure a disease from which the girl was alleged to be suffering. There was offered by the prosecu tion the evidence of another girl who testified that nine months before the prisoner, who had seduced her also, had used similar instru ments on her to produce an abortion. The court decided five to two that the evidence was admissible. The author traces the intrusion of excep tions to prove intent or guilty knowledge upon the rule of inadmissibility of proof of similar acts and approves the movement in that direction. "Opposition to this development, however, still exists. The judgments in R. v. Bond were not unanimous; lawyers commenting on it have declared emphatically that it is wrong. But are not these lawyers resting on the tradition of an old, rigorous, insular rule, rather than reasoning out the needs of justice? Even allowing that the rule in its old integrity (or in the rigidity it was at one time supposed to have) was in consonance with the judicial procedure of an earlier day, is it not well to remember, as Lord Coleridge said in Blake v. Albion Life Assurance Co., that the law of evidence has in other respects been widened, demanding a corresponding extension of the rule excluding evidence of similar acts? And since Lord Coleridge delivered that judgment there has been a still further extension in criminal procedure by the act permitting a prisoner access to the witness box. Former disabilities, as Mr. Justice Darling said in R. v. Bond, ' no longer exist, and, provided he have due notice, an accused person may fairly be confronted with evidence relevant to the issue now that he may give his own testimony, although it would have been hard to admit it when the witness box was forbidden to him.' Certainly, as the same learned judge contends, it is not ' admissible to strive for increase in the technicality of our rules of evidence so as to narrow yet more the approaches to the source of justice.' "
