Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/64

38 late division. The first result of this was feeling — unjudicially ruffled — on account of disregarded prestige and loss of patronage. But a political boss may not find it easy now to keep here during the summer vacation any judge he may wish for the contingencies of a party fight in a political campaign.

It would be unreasonable to hope that the present new order will wholly obviate our local shortcomings in getting justice by trial. As in the days of Magna Charta, we are still experimenting for justice cheap and speedy. Each issue ready for trial must, according to the court it was lodged in, wait from one to two years before it is first called. The first call of some cases has been postponed by the new combined calendar. If the courts sat, as they ought, more hours in the day and more days in the year than at present, at least until arrears of business are despatched, the enormous expense of our judicial system would be less vain. When after the long delay a case is finally reached, it is tried under pressure for time. The writer has heard an honored judge at circuit tell distinguished counsel attempting to argue questions of evidence, "Gentlemen, it is near the end of the term; next Monday I begin to try cases elsewhere; I must rule at once, and this matter may be argued on appeal." Thus the cost of many of our local lawsuits would have been simply prohib- itory to litigants in the days of King John. Some of the existing circumstances that make the outcome of a trial (especially by jury) in this city problematical are the expenses; the delay in being reached; the rush at the trial when reached; the multitude of judges; the vastness not only of the bar, but of this centre of population, whereby inscrutable relations and suppressed influences, by no means always designed, of attorneys, parties, witnesses, and jurors inter se may, however irrelevant, actually decide the case; and last, but not least, the Code of Civil Procedure.

Since 1848 we have had an attempt by our legislature to fix our civil practice by three thousand eight hundred and seventy paragraphs of statute all told, which for some years back have been amended on the average of eighty-five paragraphs a year. The cases in which the merits have been suspended that a question as to new practice — the meaning of some part of this Code — might be fought out before the courts at great delay and expense of the litigants, are myriad, and, though the reports of them fill many volumes, the pitfalls are not yet all known. The writer has known of an amendment to result from a letter