Page:North Dakota Law Review Vol. 1 No. 3 (1924).pdf/8

8  the power to discipline its members the work of the so-called “Grievance Committee” is not increased but on the contrary minor infractions disappear, and the State Bar Board is called upon to act only occasionally, and then in the most serious derelictions. I really believe that the fears expressed by some of the members of your Bar to this feature of your proposed bill have no real foundation in fact.”

Just a short time prior to his resignation, United States Attorney General Stone directed attention to the growing and insistent complaint that our system of law enforcement is breaking down in the following language:

“We make a prodigious number of laws. In enacting them we disregard the principles of draftsmanship and leave in uncertainty their true meaning and effect. More and more we take over into the field of positive law that sphere of human action which has been hitherto untrammeled by legal restrictions, without thought of the extent to which a wise policy may leave some phases of human activity to the control of moral sanctions or to the restraints of the community sense of what is right conduct.

“We disregard the principle that there is a point beyond which the restraints of positive law cannot be carried without placing too great a strain on the machinery and the agencies of law enforcement. We leave out of account the true relationship of the law to be enforced to the agencies for enforcing it. We build up our administrative machinery with ever-increasing powers and authority in administrative officers at the expense of individual liberty and freedom of the citizen.

“To preserve in our system the principles of individual liberty and to accommodate to them the requirements of an efficient administrative system, to ascertain the principles which govern the relationship of positive law to the machinery and processes of law enforcement, are problems which cannot be solved wholly in the field of politics and of government. To their solution, schools of law and of political science have contributions to make. There must be brought to bear upon them the same thorough-going research, the same analysis carried forward in the spirit of science and scholarship as have hitherto been devoted to the study of law.”