Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/514

Rh and delegates to some or all of the patriotic conventions, serving the commonwealth with distinction in almost every public capacity, at home, and also as delegates to the Conventions and Congress of the United Colonies, Truly the bar of Colonial Virginia was the school of patriots and statesmen, for whom the country at large was its debtor.

From it, the Supreme Court of the United States drew the gifted John Blair, Chief Justice Marshall and Bushrod Washington.

While neither Geo. Mason, who drafted the famous Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of independence, nor Richard Henry Lee, who moved the resolution that " these United Colonies are, and of right oughfto be, free and independent States," were ever practitioners at the bar, they were lawyers in the sense of their profound acquaintance with the law, the ancient charters and the English constitution. They were law makers and thus closely allied with the Colonial bar.

The eminent services of these great men to the national government, in its formative period, is familiar history. The names we have mentioned are only a few of the jurists and statesmen, as well as soldiers, contributed by the Colony of Virginia, her courts and bar, whose achievements redounded to the greatness and glory of the young and struggling Republic.

ATHENIAN LAWSUITS. BY A. H. NELSON. are told that the Athenians of the first century of the Christian era "spent their time in nothing else but to tell or to hear some new thing." That eager search after novelty seems to have been a marked characteristic of the dwellers in "the city of the violet crown," for of their ances tors in the fourth and fifth centuries B. C. an eminent writer upon Grecian antiquities has said, " The time of the Athenians was about equally divided between the litigation and theatre going." New things must have been daily seen and heard in the conduct of lawsuits in Athens in the days of Aristotle, and with all of our boasted improvement in legal procedure we seem, in many instances, to have only copied methods that were in use even during the tyranny of the Thirty and the Ten, if not in the even more remote past of Solon and Dracon. Athens passed through eleven quite dis tinctly marked political revolutions. In the last of these democracy, thrice overthrown,

was again restored, and since it was through the political sagacity as much as by the military prowess of Thrasyboulus that first the Thirty Tyrants and, subsequently, their direct, but only temporary successors, the Ten, were deposed, that politico -military leader became the head of the latest Atheni an democracy. In the third century, B. C., when the Athenians were living under this Democratic Constitution, there were in every lawsuit four formally prescribed steps that must betaken to secure the verdict of the HELIA i A or Supreme Court. i. THE SUMMONS OR PKOKLESIS. This must in both civil and ' criminal cases be served by the plaintiff or prosecutor, in per son and in the presence of witnesses. A most notable instance of such service of summons we have in the case of Alcibiades, who, having been impeached before the Senate, was overtaken while on his way to Sicily and ordered to return and stand trial. The presence of two witnesses was required