[115]. The mere fact that a person who becomes a shareholder must be taken to have impliedly agreed to be bound not only by the articles as they stand, but by any subsequent modification of them, does not render subsequent modifications conventional instead of legislative in their nature. The immediate source of the new rules is not agreement, but imposition by superior authority.
[116]. Plato’s Laws, 624. Spencer’s Sociology, II. pp. 515 et seq.
[117]. On this and other grounds “judge-made law,” as he called it, was the object of constant denunciation by Bentham. “It is the judges,” he says in his vigorous way (Works, V. 235), “that make the common law. Do you know how they make it? Just as a man makes laws for his dog. When your dog does anything you want to break him of, you wait till he does it and then beat him. This is the way you make laws for your dog, and this is the way the judges make laws for you and me.”
[118]. D. 1. 3. 17.
[119]. Strict interpretation is an equivocal expression, for it means either literal or narrow. When a provision is ambiguous, one of its meanings may be wider than the other, and the strict (i.e. narrow) sense is not necessarily the strict (i.e. literal) sense. When the equitable interpretation of a law is wider than the literal, it is called extensive; when narrower, it is called restrictive.
[120]. In the interpretation of contracts, no less than in that of statutes, there is to be noticed this distinction between the real and the latent intention of the parties. The difficulty of construing a contract arises more often from the fact that the parties had no clear intention at all as to the particular point, than from the fact that they failed to express an intention which they actually had.
[121]. Hale’s History of the Common Law, chap. ii.
[122]. Blackstone, I. 63.
[123]. Co. Litt. 141 a; The Case of Tanistry, Dav. Rep. 32; Blackstone, I. 77.
[124]. “If any general custom were directly against the law of God, or if any statute were made directly against it, ... the custom and statute were void.” Doctor and Student, Dial. I. ch. 6. See also Bonham’s Case, 8 Co. Rep. 118a; Coke’s 2nd Inst. 587; Hobart, 87; Blackstone, I. 91; Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law, I. 491; Pollock, Jurisprudence, pp. 262–267.