Until the day dawns when national boundaries and distinctions have no special significance in an internation-lized world, it is highly desirable national labels should, in the main, carry the interpretation us ly applied to them. Although the Crown lost its action in the Registrar's Court in the Guaranty Under writers' case there will be considerable sympathy for the view that the services of British officials and 4 British administrative machinery should not be exploitable by non-British subjects under cover of apparently British style. The Reg-Istrar's judgment—against which it may or may not be the intention of the Crown to appeal—holds that the law was on the side of the defendant.
This decision, apart from its legal merits, will in itself cause no particular heartburning. Yet, on the broad basis of the Crown's contention, there ground to inquire whether some amendment of the law should not b attempted. In this country such an Inquiry is specially pertinent. The existence of the system of territorial jurisdiction makes it all the more desirable that extraterritorial judicial processes should be strictly applied to the nationals of the country for whom those processes have been set up. In other words it is damaging to legitimate rights under that system that a practice can grow up to per mit the nationals of Utopia, by as suming the status of Laputans, to do certain things impossible to them as, Utopians. Too hard and fast an application of this principle might, conceivable be embarrassing, but the resources of legal draftsmanship in amending the Order-in-Council should be equal to avoidance of tha: diffculty, while preventing abuses which certainly seem likely to arise unde: ithe exceedingly loose definition now in force.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.