Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 21.pdf/108

 The

Volume XXI

Green

Bag

March, 1909

Number 3

Conservatism in Legal Procedure* By Frederick W. Lehmann President op the American Bar Association IT is fundamental in our jurispru dence that every man is presumed to know the law and that ignorance of the law excuses no one. If it were otherwise, the rule of judgment must vary with each case, depending not upon the law itself, but upon the meas ure of knowledge of the law shown to be possessed by the persons involved. Such an issue would present as many difficulties as an inquest of sanity, and if it were a necessary incident to the trial of cases, would make the admin istration of justice impossible to human powers. What everybody is presumed to know, everybody should have reasonable oppor tunity to learn. We condemn as in human the tyrant of olden days who wrote his mandates in letters so small and upon tablets posted so high that his people could not read them. Have we done much better? If an American wishes to know the laws of his country he must turn to several hundred volumes of statutes, several thousand volumes of reports of adjudicated cases and almost as many more volumes of text-books, •An address delivered before the Oklahoma State Bar Association at Oklahoma City, Jan. 4, 1909.

commenting upon and expounding the statutes and the cases. If he has time for research in this large library he will find doubt expressed as to the meaning of statutes, adjudicated cases in direct conflict, and text writers in marked dis agreement, but the rule by which he is to be governed in any transaction is somewhere in that confused mass of legal lore, and it is so plain and so simple that it is his own fault if he does not find it or does not understand when he has found it. The practical result of it all is not so bad as might be apprehended. So far as concerns the great mass of human actions, the law is in accord with the common opinion of what is right, and men go in and out in the daily course of life, walking in the ways of the law simply because they follow the dictates of their own consciences. This is not, however, and cannot be, universally true. In the complexity of modern society there are many relations gov erned necessarily by conventional rules. What is lawful in these relations is not always obvious, and a man may err in them without impeachment either of his integrity or intelligence. He may, foi