Excerpt from The Present Law of Abuse of Legal Procedure This book is supplementary to the author's History of Conspiracy and Abuse of Legal Procedure published this year by the Cambridge University Press in the series entitled Cambridge Studies in English Legal History. As was pointed out in the Preface to that book, the scope of the series made it necessary to split into two books what was originally intended to be one volume. In general, the line of cleavage between the history and the present law was tolerably well-marked, but in Embracery, Misconduct of Jurors, and Frivolous Arrests, it was so blurred as to make separation impracticable. The present law relating to these topics will therefore be found in Chapters VII and VIII of the History of Conspiracy and Abuse of Legal Procedure. The law relating to Perjury is so easily accessible in the textbooks on Criminal Law, and Contempt of Court has been so thoroughly explored by Mr Oswald, that the inclusion of them in this book would have added nothing to it except bulk. The time will come when the law reformer will lay his hand upon abuse of legal procedure, and the author would respectfully suggest that a little extension of the law of Conspiracy would suffice to cover all the ground occupied by Embracery, Common Barratry, and (at least on their criminal side) Maintenance and Champerty. Indeed, it would be merely harking back to the original idea of Conspiracy, which at its birth was implicated almost exclusively with abuse of legal procedure; and it would also be in keeping with the modern tendency to widen the law of Conspiracy. Reform would thus take the line of least resistance with respect both to the past and to the present, and the happy despatch would be given to some cataleptic parts of the law, whose very names are unfamiliar to many practitioners. 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.