Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 12.djvu/110

90 90 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. rules of evidence, subject to such limitations as may seem prudent, — subject only, it might be hoped, to a few large and simple prin- ciples which are the skeleton of our present system. We can hardly hope for wisdom enough in the legislature to accompHsh in any other way what is needed. Good legislation of any sort, in the way of law reform, is very hard, almost impossible, to get. Yet a small and instructed body of lawyers, in any legislature, can over- come even this difficulty ; and such a body, in any community, might well hope to carry through so reasonable a provision as that of charg- ing the courts with a general control over the rules of evidence, when once they themselves were persuaded of the need of it. But I do not forget that, on such subjects as this, the lawyers are often the persons chiefly needing to be roused and convinced, and that this is the greatest obstacle to be overcome. This was strongly put two years ago by a leading member of the bar.^ In recommend- ing to a body of young lawyers as their special work, " for all their lives," — aside from the necessary work of their immediate calHng, — the great business of" the amendment of the law," using the words in a large sense, the distinguished speaker recognized the fact "that no class in modern society is more conservative, more timid in pro- moting, more resolute in resisting, alterations in existing law, than the body of which we are members." And after alluding to other possible reasons for what he calls " the dull conservatism of many lawyers," he adds that " there is a timidity borne of mere ignorance. . . . And so it is the narrowness of vision, the imperfect intelligence of many lawyers which makes them . . . apprehensive of changes which they think untried experiments." These excellent suggestions point to the chief difficulty in accomplishing such a change as I am proposing, so far as it is dependent on legislation. Yet, as I said, a few enlightened and resolute lawyers, men of recognized legal capacity and character, could, with good fortune, carry through any of our legislatures some such prudent measure of reform as I am suggesting. In Massachusetts we have had a typical illustration of what a well-trained lawyer may do for his profession in the way of law reform, by the simplest methods. Nearly fifty years ago Mr- B. R. Curtis, who, two years later, in 1851, became Mr. Justice Curtis of the Supreme Court of the United States, being a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, introduced a reso- lution for the appointment of three commissioners " to revise and 1 Address by Hon. Theodore Bacon, before the Graduating Class of the Yale Law School, in 1896.