Admittedly, Singer notes that the Rule has been modified in several states. Coke would have been disappointed. After students had studied this treatise meant for students they would not know the law. Some years before the publication of Singer’s book I published an article with the provocative title, ‘Introduction to Law for Second-Year Law Students?145 I wrote that I had posed some basic questions on the Rule in my upper-level class on Jurisprudence, and that I expected and got no answers. I write: I next turned to another distinguished treatise, William B. Stoebuck and Dale A. Whitman, The Law of Property. 146 They tell us a little about the rationale: “The common law Rule against Perpetuities is based upon its long-established judicial policy against permitting effective restraints upon the alienation of fee simple estates in land and equivalent interest in personality.”147 But they do not disclose why this was judicial policy or explain why we have the precise parameters that we have. We, and the students, are left in the dark as to the rationale of the Rule. I do not dispute that there have been serious attempts by scholars, especially legal historians, to explain the rationale of the Rule. But my concern is different: to show that even today distinguished scholars, aware that the California Supreme Court considered the Rule too difficult for the comprehension of average lawyers, did not feel it necessary to explain the rationale of the Rule, or to demonstrate a link between the authority of the Rule and its rationale. For them, the relationship between one branch of law and another is quite obscure. They are daunted by such questions as “Why is employment not property?” Does it matter? Why may incorporeals be “things” in all the states of the U.S.A., when in Germany they are not? Are foreign legal systems just so very different, not worth looking at for understanding our own legal assumptions? 145 Journal of Legal Education(1996), pp. 430 ff. 146 3d edit. (St Paul, Minn., 2000), pp. 118 ff. 147 Property, pp. 118.
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