The number of extant reports of Slade's Case, by different hands, indicates the significance which the case possessed for contemporary lawyers. Its subsequent significance was assured by its inclusion in Coke's Reports, an honour which entitled it to all the attention which posterity is obliged to bestow on leading cases; but, for three centuries, the more that was written about it the more difficult it became to remember or to imagine what it had meant when it was decided. The case has been partially redeemed from its oblivion by recent studies, but it is becoming plain that it is still not understood, and perhaps will not be fully understood for some years to come. It is hoped that the publication of some of the leading arguments in the case, in the last issue of this Journal, will help to bring understanding within closer reach. Those arguments, however, presuppose a familiarity with the problems the case was intended to solve. Although part of the background may be learned from the published reports and Year Books, the story which they reveal is neither complete nor clear. The older cases are too sparse, too badly reported and cover too many years for any safe general conclusions to be drawn from them. They are relevant to the investigation in so far as they formed part of the Elizabethan lawyers' common education, providing a starting point for further discussion, and a recourse for those who sought authority for everything in their old books. But the burning questions in the minds of those who awaited the final pronouncement in Slade's Case were not Year Book questions, or ancient moot points, but new questions which had only come to the fore in the preceding ten or fifteen years.

Professor Davis has generated renewed debate on the subject of “discretionary justice” by the recent publication of his book by that title. His thesis, basically, is that the subject is capable of study, and that we should devote more of our resources to the study and less to the traditional court- and rule-oriented approach that is so characteristic of the legal profession and of legal scholarship. He is surely right that the manner in which discretion is exercised—by the policeman deciding whether to arrest; by the prosecuting officials determining whether to prosecute—more frequently constitutes the relevant “law” of a given situation than the formal rules that we write down in statute books and in judicial opinions.

To most lawyers, Shiloh has hitherto signified, according to taste, either sn Old Testament shrine or a battle in the American Civil War, or both. In view of the general Lancastrian sympathy for the Confederate cause in the 1860S, it is presumed that the plaintiff's mill in Shiloh Spinners Ltd. V. Harding, which has given the name a new and daunting association, was named after the second of the two locations. The case, for which leave has been given for an appeal to the house of lords, involved a further consideration of that embattled statute, the Land Charges Act 1925, and of several other points of fundamental importance to land lawyers. This article is mainly concerned with the points concerning the interpretation of the Land Charges Act, which, it will be suggested, contain some unnecessary and alarming novelties. Before considering the complex facts of Shiloh itself, however, a few general observations on the land charge system are needed.

“All Cretans are liars,” said Epimenides—at first sight a common-place scrap of mild xenophobia; about equal to “Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief” in charity and acumen. Not, one would suppose, a statement calculated to attract close attention from philosophers or logicians, or (despite the introduction of the offence of incitement to racial hatred) from lawyers.

But Epimenides' statement was widely discussed by the best thinkers of classical times and has kept its importance for the foundations of logic until the present century. To understand why, it is necessary to add two facts. First, Epimenides was himself a Cretan. Secondly, his statement was taken to mean not just that all Cretans lied from time to time but that everything ever said by any Cretan was false. It thus implies, in particular, that it is itself false. Not only can this be shown to lead to absurd consequences; it also suggests a simpler form of sentence which heightens the absurdity and best introduces the following discussion. It is: “This statement is false.” If that is true it is false, and if it is false it is true. So we have the paradox of a sentence which breaks no rule of formal grammar, is composed entirely of words whose sense is well understood, combines those words in such a way as to produce an apparently normal and meaningful statement, but turns out on investigation to have something radically wrong with it. We feel inclined to say that it has proved to be “meaningless” or “self-contradictory,” or to involve a “vicious circle.”

Slade's Case is of such significance in the history of the common law that it has, quite properly, been the subject of more scrutiny and discussion in recent years than any other case of the same age. The foundation of all this discussion has been Coke's report, which is the only full report in print. The accuracy and completeness of Coke's version have hardly been challenged, and the discussions have assumed that it contains almost all there is to know about the case. This assumption must be discarded if we are to understand the contemporary significance of the case.