SECTON 21. Thirtieth Legislature (1907). Defeated. Permitting legislature to regulate all state printing, stationery, paper, and fuel contracts. SECTION 30. Twenty-third Legislature (1893). Adopted. Giving the railroad commissioners six-year terms, one retiring every two years; and making the members elective. ADD SECTION 30a. Thirty-second Legislature (1911). Adopted. Giving legislature power to fix six-year terms, one-third retiring every two years, for governing bodies of state educational, eleemosynary, and penal institutions. ADD SECTION 58. Thirty-third Legislature (1913). Defeated. Providing that all state, district, county, and precint officers be paid by salaries. SECTION 58. Thirty-second Legislature (1911). Adopted. Creating a board of prison commissioners of three members appointed by governor with consent of senate for six-year terms, one retiring every two years. Thirty-seventh Legislature (1921). Defeated. Giving the legislature full power to provide for the management and control of the prison system. (Session laws show this authorized as XVII:58. There is no such section.) ADD SECTION 59. Thirty-fifth Legislature (1917). Adopted. Making the conservation of natural resources a public right and duty; authorizing the legislature to pass necessary laws; and providing for the creation of conservation districts. ADD SECTION 60. Authorizing the legislature to fix compensation by salary of state, district, county and precinct officers; and authorizing the legislature to make such exceptions as seem advisable. Thirty-sixth Legislature (1919). Defeated. Authorizing the legislature to permit prisoners or their dependents to share in the net profits of the prison system. ADD NEW SECTION. Thirty-sixth Legislature (1919). Defeated. Authorizing city and county of Galveston each to issue in the aggregate $5,000,000 in bonds for protective works irrespective of other constitutional limits; and imposing certain conditions. NOTES FROM ARKANSAS PREPARED BY DAVID Y. THOMAS University of Arkansas The first law passed under the initiative process was a child labor law (1915). Since then the Terry Dairy Company employed one Nally, a boy under fourteen, to drive one of its wagons and while in the employ of the company the boy fell off the wagon and was injured. Although decisions had been rendered in other states upholding such laws the dairy company, when sued for damages, attacked the constitutionality of the law as interfering with the freedom of contract, but the supreme court upheld it as a valid exercise of the police power. The court also held that, as the employment of a child under fourteen was negligence per se, the defense could not set up the plea of assumption of risk or contributory negligence or the negligence of a third party (street car motorman). The final defense offered by the defendant was that the child had misrepresented his age at the time of employment. On this the court ruled that the right of the child to maintain an action for injuries under the statute was not affected by the fact that he had obtained employment by misrepresenting his age and then, curiously enough, reversed the decision of the lower court in favor of the plaintiff on the ground that the court had not allowed the defendant to prove that the child had represented that he was sixteen at the time of employment. Terry Dairy Company v. Nally, 146 Arkansas, 448-461. The legislature of 1921 passed a law requiring retailers of "gasoline, kerosene, or other products used by purchasers in the propelling of motor vehicles using combustible type of engines over the highways of the state" to collect a tax of one cent a gallon, one-half to go to the state highway fund, the other half to the county general fund. The constitutionality of this law was tested in the courts, the plaintiffs relying chiefly on the plea that this was a second tax on gasoline, which had already been taxed once along with other property. However, the court overruled their plea, holding that the tax was only a payment for a license. In 1920 the State Plant Board issued an order for the destruction of all cedar trees infected with cedar rust within three miles of an apple orchard in order to protect the apple trees from cedar rust. Some owners of cedar trees objected to the destruction of their property in order to protect a different kind of property owned by another, but the supreme court has just upheld the order of the plant board as a valid exercise of police power. In line with this decision pear orchards affected with blight are now being destroyed voluntarily. Arkansas is one of the states having no workmen's compensation law and here the doctrine of the assumption of risk still holds in some cases. In two cases decided the same year the supreme court upheld the doctrine, but in one case upheld the decision of the lower court for damages on the ground that the injured party knew nothing of the dangerous condition which had been brought about in his absence (Central Coal and Coke Company v. Fitzgerald, 146 Arkansas, 109), but denied damages in the other on the ground that the plaintiff knew the night shift had been blasting down the roof near his place of work and that it was not an uncommon thing for false shots to bring about dangerous conditions (Alix Coal Company v. Nelson, Ibid., 574). In a decision recently reported in the newspapers the supreme court declared that a trace of negro blood was sufficient to make one a negro in the eyes of the law and upheld the action of a school board in excluding the plaintiff's child, a girl, from the white school. NOTES FROM OKLAHOMA PREPARED BY M. H. MERRILL University of Oklahoma The summer session of the University of Oklahoma will close July 31. Enrollment this year has reached a mark |