Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 05.pdf/264

 English and American Bar in Contrast.

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ENGLISH AND AMERICAN BAR IN CONTRAST. BY A. OAKEY HALL. T^HE meeting at the Behring Sea Arbitra- Street begins, and where old London in -•tion Court, the first since the Geneva the sixteenth-century gateway of the Middle Conference, of American lawyers and British Temple confronts new London in the im barristers in a foreign court-room, suggests pressive frontage of the Royal Courts of to even laymen a comparison between the Justice, with its unsanitary, narrow, and English and our own bar. honeycombed court-rooms and corridors, — When an American lawyer visits the that average Londoner sees nothing whim London courts, the element of difference sical in the apparitions of bevvigged and between his own home legal procedures begowned barristers, hatless and umbrellaand the new ones confronting him, which less, scudding across the street from the first impresses him, is the extreme artificial court-room to their adjacent chambers of a ity that permeates all these new procedures. rainy day; for the average Londoner is He is at once sensibly imbued with the tutored to believe that wig and gown are as presence of that " circumlocution " in Eng sacred institutions of the British Constitu lish affairs which, as characteristic of Great tion as are the Speaker's and Sergeant's Britain, Dickens brought so interestingly mace in the House of Commons, or the Lord Mayor's gilded coach. But the Amer to the fore. When becoming better ac quainted with the progress of English liti ican lawyer, accustomed to see the usual gation, the American tourist-lawyer finds Jove-like front of his judge, and the impres sive features of the lawyer of his vicinage, that this artificiality increases in a geomet each clad in the customary habiliments of rical progression. It is not alone the broad-banded wig and business or social life, when witnessing the fur-tipped cape and the gown of the judge, toilette incidents of " play-acting " life in nor the horse-hair nightcap of the plain bar and about a court-room, perceives the whim rister, nor the curled hood of the Q. C., nor sicality of it; and he naturally asks, Cm the slatternly cotton black gown of the ush bono? ers which embodies the preliminary idea of But all this that has been noticed is ex artificiality. But judicial wig and fur seem to ternal artificiality; and let us next consider destroy judicial spontaneity; and the cling the internal artificiality of English legal life. ing robes of advocates and horse-hair adorn Let us take the case of another American ments seem to rebuke their own desires who visits London in order to become a toward naturalness of gesture and tone, and necessary litigant. He has heard of Frank to transform them all into melodramatic Lockwood, Q. C., of Mr. Cock, Q. C., of actors. Moreover, in intercourse of bar with Sir Edward Clark, O. C., Lawson Walton, bar, and bar with bench, and both with suit Q. C., Sir Charles Russell, Q. C., etc., and ors or witnesses or jurymen, the artificiality selects in his mind one of these as his law extends. yer. Having discovered the whereabouts of To these observations the Englishman his selection, the American litigant sets out answers that this apparent artificiality im on his pilgrimage. presses the English public by increasing His selected counsel will not be found in symbolic respect for law and order. And Gray's Inn, — consecrate to the memory of certainly the average Londoner, who stands Bacon, Lord Verulam, where the stiff, for where the Strand Avenue ends and Fleet bidding-looking, long row of soot-stained