Bruce Wyman
Published: 2015-07-12
Total Pages: 630
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Excerpt from Cases on Public Service Companies: Public Carriers, Public Works, and Other Public Utilities This collection of cases is designed to show the development of the law of public service in its most modem forms: the public carriers, the public works, and the other public utilities. The distinction between the private callings - the rule - and the public, callings - the exception - is a striking feature of the law governing business relations as it is to-day. The causes of the division are economic rather than strictly legal. Free competition, the very basis of the modem social organization, superseded almost completely medieval restrictions, but it has just come to be recognized that the process of free competition fails in some cases to secure the public good, and it has been reluctantly admitted that some control is necessary over such lines of industry as are affected with a public interest. At this point the problem of public callings becomes a legal one. No one can carefully study the authorities on this subject without feeling that we are just entering upon a great and important development of the common law. What branches of industry will eventually be of such public importance as to be included in the category of public callings, and to what extent the control of the courts will be carried in the effort to solve by law the modem economic problems, it would be rash to predict. Enormous business combinations, virtual monopolization of the necessaries of life, the strife of labor and capital, now the concern of the economist and the statesman, may prove susceptible of legal control through the doctrines of the law of public callings. These doctrines are not yet clearly defined. 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.