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The article discusses on the effect of the recent decisions of the supreme court on reproduction cost as a test of value. The recent Supreme Court cases would appear to have settled one important question of constitutional law, and to have raised without settling one equally, perhaps more, important question of evidence. Unless the Supreme Court sees fit to substitute the views so forcibly expressed in the minority opinion in the South-Western Telephone case for the less skillfully presented majority opinion, that they must assume that the present value of the company's property, rather than the capital invested in the business, is to be taken as the base value in a rate case.

This article presents information on common laws on the proper methods of valuing property for various judicial and administrative purposes. The absence in the Anglo-American common law, until a relatively recent date, of all discussion of the methods of valuing property is difficult to reconcile either with the fact that the decisions on value in cases of trespass, trover, contract, taxation and eminent domain are now accumulating at the rate of about five hundred per annum, or with the fact that judicial or administrative valuations for all these purposes have been common during several generations and for some of these purposes during many centuries.

Examines the facts and information of valuation of property in Roman law. Features of the different kinds of value: market, ordinary or general, value to the owner, and sentimental value; General rules of valuation; Application of the principle to several compensation and non-compensation cases.