Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 10.djvu/66

40 40 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. defence on the merits, and swears to the necessary papers for ah examination of the plaintiff to enable the corporation to plead, and to stay all other proceedings meanwhile. The plaintiff is a merchant on Union Square, and he is dragged down town once every ten days all summer, each time to face a new judge, till in September, the judge having an eaily engagement to go to Coney Island, summarily ends the farce. The pleading is never served, but the defendant promptly settles. Owing to the variety of mind on the bench, cases are nursed by counsel so as to avoid certain judges and to come before others. Nobody expects one kind of law from all the judges. Calendar practice is a nuisance almost unmitigated. The issue when framed lies by from one to two years to be reached, and when first called it is usual to let it go over for two weeks. Set- ting down a case on the day calendar usually starts a period of fret, — the judges pulling the lawyers one way, the clients and wit- nesses clamorous to go to their affairs in the other. The writer has answered " ready " on a case at first once, and later twice, every court day from the beginning till the twenty-second of a month, and then the judge suddenly announced that he would take up no case to be two days in trial. This sent the case over to the next term, when it appeared at the end of a long calendar, but owing to a "break" was immediately tried. Lawyers cannot expect fair compensation for this ineffective fret. It makes litigation odious to the parties, and most witnesses unwilling. To each of the twenty-two justices of the Supreme Court in this city, his judgeship came as an elevation in almost every sense, and that elevation proceeds as his services go on. Since ■the days of Tweed, local bosses and politicians have had some degree of awe for the bench, and even though they set upon it men degraded by heavy political assessment, they have still been men with the beginning of capacity. It is a public detriment for a judge to learn all oi his law in the course of his office, but in this city the business is so enormous, so varied, and so quick, that a fresh judge must learn speedily or be swamped. If a justice on Supreme Court Chambers does well all that he seems to be doing when the rush before him is at its worst, Julius Caesar might well ask to be retired as an exemplar of the power of effective divided attention. As a rule, the new judges develop rapidly to the good, and at their best belong to the public. The tradition grows that good service on the bench binds all parties to the re-election of a