Excerpt from Selection of Cases Illustrative of English Criminal Law The increased attention which, of recent years, has been bestowed, both in England and in the United States, upon the methods of legal education, has caused a fuller recognition of the great value which case-law possesses for even the elementary student. Only by means of concrete cases can he give vividness and reality to the abstract principles which he learns from his text-books, or even form a clear idea of the way in which questions, whether of law or of feet, are bandied in everyday practice by our courts of justice. But, valuable though this part of his legal training is, it is the part in which he most needs direction. Elementary students who read the Reports under their own guidance are prone to reverse the true order of things, by attending to the names of cases rather than to their facts, and to the facts rather than to the principles decided. Even when the principle itself is sought for, it is too often sought only by the compendious method of perusing nothing of the case beyond the head note; a plan of study which combines the disadvantages of reading case-law with those of reading text-books. And even a student whose greater assiduity has saved him from these errors is often led, by a natural inclination for reading recent cases in preference to older ones, to waste his time upon the study of decisions that are concerned only with some refined limitation of a fundamental doctrine, when he has not yet become acquainted with the cases in which that broad doctrine itself is established. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The third and final volume of A History of Cambridge University Press, covering 1873-1972.