ΤΟ WILLIAM JOHNSON, Esq. DEAR SIR, IN compiling these volumes, (originally intended, and now published for the benefit of American students,) I have frequently been led to revisit the same ground, and to follow out the same paths, over which I have so often passed with you as a companion to cheer and delight me. You have reported every opinion which I gave in term time, and thought worth reporting, during the five-andtwenty years that I was a Judge at Law and in Equity, with the exception of the short interval occupied by Mr. Caines's Reports. During that long period, I had the happiness to maintain a free, cordial, and instructive intercourse with you; and I feel unwilling now to close my labors as an author, and withdraw myself finally from the public eye, without leaving some memorial of my grateful sense of the value of your friendship, and my reverence for your character. In inscribing this work to you, I beg leave, sir, at the same time, to add my ardent wishes for your future welfare, and assure you of my constant esteem and regard. JAMES KENT. PREFACE TO FOURTEENTH EDITION. THE masterpiece of Chancellor Kent has now become so interwoven with judicial decisions that these commentaries upon our frame of government and system of laws will doubtless continue to rank as the first of American legal classics so long as the present order shall prevail. It is worthy of note that, in the preparation of this edition, notwithstanding the rapid development and extension of doctrine in our growing country, the statements of this jurist, though long since made, have rarely been found criticised or curtailed in final decisions. The thorough and lucid annotation of Judge Holmes in the twelfth edition, which placed the work fully in harmony with the later researches and the current of more recent decision, has in all respects been preserved and retained, as first published, in this edition. The notes of Mr. Barnes in the thirteenth edition, which though not so elaborate, added much of value, are now chiefly enclosed in brackets and followed by the letter B. In this form, when directly relating to matters discussed in the notes of Judge Holmes, they are added thereto; in other cases they have in the main been added, with the same designation, to the older notes. Certain of Mr. Barnes's notes, based upon decisions which have been overruled or more carefully considered in recent cases before courts of the highest authority, are now omitted or briefly incorporated in the new notes, in order to save space and to prevent the repetition of the same discussion, with different results, in more than one place. The aim of the present editor has been to present fully the growth of doctrine in recent years upon all the topics discussed in this work; to supply new illustrations of the principles derived from the very latest decisions; to define the extension or limits of these principles resulting from such decisions, and especially to fortify the work in parts not recently much developed, especially in those relating to the Law of Nations, equity, judgments, taxation, master and servant, aliens, the domestic relations, patents, copyrights, and trade-marks. An examination of the new notes, which are in double columns at the foot of the pages, and are indicated by the last letters of the alphabet, will best enable an intelligent profession to determine the value of this new material, in which nearly nine thousand cases have been added to the twenty-four thousand cases cited in the last edition, not including the frequent citation of other authorities than the reports and the not infrequent further use made of decisions already cited in that edition. JOHN M. GOULD. BOSTON, MASS., Aug. 1, 1896. i |