Finding
The tone of the book is in the main highly laudatory, and perhaps pardonably so in the face of the record.
Paper
Society in Transition . By Barnes Harry Elmer. (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1939. Pp. xviii, 999. $5.00.)
Abstract
seen conditions of today, some of his decisions are still as sound as when rendered. In The Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon, he gave a breadth of immunity to instrumentalities of a sovereign state which has occasioned much confusion in this day of state-owned or controlled merchant marines and other enterprises. But the author points out that in one of Marshall's little quoted decisions, that of the Bank of the United States v. the Planters Bank of Georgia, the state as merchant loses the immunity it possesses as sovereign. His respect for neutral property rights, however, carried him to the length of granting court protection against confiscation even when the property was found on belligerent armed merchantmen, one of the few cases where he depended on bis slender store of bookknowledge in the face of the contrary practice of states. The tone of the book is in the main highly laudatory, and perhaps pardonably so in the face of the record. Exception might well be taken to the author's interpretation of the present status of international law: "In Marshall's day there existed a real jus gentium, a common law of all civilized nations. Today most nations of the world deem themselves entirely too civilized to be bound by any such absurd and ludicrous conception." International law today controls the relations of states quite as well as it did in the time of Napoleon with which Marshall was familiar.
Authors
W. Laves
Journal
American Political Science Review