I may, I hope not inappropriately, begin by recalling a story told by our Chairman's distinguished predecessor, Sir William Anson, about Mr. Gladstone. While he was out of office, in 1890 Mr. Gladstone accepted an invitation to visit All Souls. The invitation included a request that he would give some kind of an address to the members of the Union Society, which had been the scene of his triumphs as an undergraduate sixty years ago. He agreed to do so and in a discussion with his host, the Warden of All Souls, as to a choice of subject Mr. Gladstone said that the subject did not very much matter provided it was one of general interest. He was thereupon persuaded to choose his own topic, and in due course he gave an eloquent address to a large undergraduate audience on ‘The Connexion of Homer with recent Assyriological Discovery’.

The commendation of Mr. Hamlin's book Legal Education in Colonial New York in the foreword by Emeritus Professor Beale should ensure for it a warm welcome by the Cambridge Law Faculty, apart from the interest which its subject merits on the part of a body of teachers.

In English law the definitions of the most important crimes were framed in an age when economic conditions and social relations were simple and when the paramount need was to give protection rather against violence than against deceit. As time passed a much more complicated economic order developed and in consequence of this evolution the intellectual aspect of crime gained an ever increasing prominence at the expense of the physical aspect. Not only did more subtle forms of transgression in the economic sphere, such as are now the crimes of forgery, obtaining by false pretences, etc., make their appearance, but also the lines of demarcation between what should be regarded as business astuteness and what should be stigmatized as criminal fraud became more and more difficult to draw.

It is commonly stated that one of the many effects of the Statute of Uses, 1535, was that the power of devising land which had been acquired by means of uses was abolished. It has also been said that this power ‘would subsequently have been recovered through that construction of the Statute which afterwards gave rise to the modern system of trusts’, i.e. by the enforcement of a use upon a use as a trust. The object of this article is to suggest that on the construction of the Statute which became generally accepted by the Courts the Statute never in fact made it impossible to make what was in effect a devise by means of a use, but augmented the power to devise by making it possible to pass the legal estate; and further, that this fact was recognized long before the Restoration when uses upon a use were first regularly enforced as trusts.

The boundary between the fields of mistake and impossibility in contract seems never yet to have been critically surveyed. But such a survey is badly needed, for it is plain that at the moment the law of mistake is in no less a state of confusion than is the law of impossibility or ‘frustration’. The outstanding case of recent years, Bell v. Lever Bros., Ltd. (1931), met with such universal and (if it may humbly be said) unmerited hostility from publicists in all quarters that this alone calls for an inquiry into the difficulties of the subject. There, has been a disturbing tendency among text-writers, led by Pollock, to profess an inability to understand the ratio deddendi of the case, to try to limit it for the future to its exact facts, and to refuse to recognize in it any legal principle.

The aim of this article is to consider and state the effects upon private rights of treaties of peace, or, more precisely, of some of the normal contents of treaties of peace. We are not concerned with the automatic consequences of the coming into force of a treaty of peace, namely, the cessation of the operation of the many rules of law which affect the nationals and residents of a country upon its passing from a state of war into a state of peace.

We shall deal with the following topics:—

A.—Summary of public international law.

B.—Territorial changes.

C.—Change in nationality—plebiscite—options.

D.—Change in domicil?

E.—The scope of the power of a State to affect the private rights of its nationals.

F.—Effect upon nationals of third States.

G.—How far a peace treaty concluded by the British Crown involves legislation.

H.—The relation of the British Crown to its subjects in regard to a peace treaty.

In August, 1941, the Faculty Board of Law appointed a Committee to consider the promotion of Research and Teaching in Criminal Science. The members of the Committee are Professor P. H. Winfield (Chairman), Dr. L. Radzinowics Dr. R. M. Jackson and Mr. J. W. C. Turner (Secretary). The scheme which it is exploring comprises:-

1. The prosecution of research.

2. The promotion of a series of publications.

3. The organization of lectures in Cambridge by recognized authorities on various branches of Criminal Science.