Cases on the Law of Municipal Corporations

Abstract

This 1931 edition of Professor Tooke's casebook on municipal corporations is in plan and approach much like his popular first edition. Recent ferment in legal ideas has worked but few changes. The book is still dedicated to a search for fundamental principles, and cases are again, for the most part, clustered about legal concepts rather than situations of fact. Annotation of a useful kind is scant. Little non-legal material is included. There is here, as there was in the earlier edition, an excellent example of what an able editor can do in what some now choose to call the old tradition. Traces of a functional approach are rare. Modern scepticism about the existence or utility of legal principles has left Professor Tooke untouched. He aspired in his first edition to present cases and topics in that sequence which would "best serve to develop the underlying principles" of his subject. This later volume is offered because a rapidly expanding "law of municipal corporations" has brought about a "wealth of new decisions applying the fundamental principles of local government" to "new conditions." One wonders just what Professor Tooke can mean by these statements. Is he suggesting that there are certain permanent principles of the law of municipal corporations? If so, what are they? Who made them principles? Principles for whom? For what? Do they remain the same principles even when expanded to take in new situations? Why a new edition in 1931 if the fundamental principles were known in 1926?