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The Green Bag

Another Iowa lawyer uses an un conventional letter-head, in which he inserts the words :— "Red-Headed Legal Napoleon of the Slope. Happy But Not Satisﬁed. References, My Enemies—They are Unbiased. Fees are the Sinews of War.”

and for that reason,——and that reason alone, the case had to be dismissed. No single right would have been lost had the case gone to trial on the indict

ment.

In the event the government

had failed to show that the defendant

company was engaged in interstate THE LAW MADE RIDICULOUS

IN

the cases

recently

instituted

against the National Packing Com pany in Chicago, failure to insert a half-dozen words in an indictment undid the work of weeks——of months.

Lengthy investigation on the part of government officials; extended sessions

of a special grand jury; examination of witnesses from widely separated sections of the country; weeks of labor by lawyers, and the paying out of enormous sums of money,-——all counted

for nothing simply because a grand jury had overlooked a triﬂing averment, in making its return to the court. The prosecution, in the formal pre sentation of the case, neglected to set up an obvious fact, namely: that the defendant was engaged in business having to do with interstate com merce! There were hundreds and hundreds of

business, then there could have been issue against, and the assumption that

there was an effort making to prosecute for an offense which could not exist made necessary a most wretched con tortion of human reasoning. Still, the judge in his ruling in the case, did nothing more than follow the law. In the face of such occurrences

as this——and they are numerous——is it at all surprising that our courts are

congested with “business," and that it is next to impossible to secure a prompt

and satisfactory administration of jus tice? Is it at all surprising, either, that the public is fast becoming disgusted with the law, as a means of punishing

crime, or adjudicating civil differences? And there is nothing strange that we ﬁnd the President of the United States, himself one of the foremost lawyers

words in that indictment—words that

of the country, protesting against sense less judicial delays. Is it not about time we were getting away from webs woven about our courts

repeated over and over again, what the defendant had done, and wherein it

of justice, by centuries of practice and precedent? And the lawyers of the

was charged with violating the law. Its

country should lead the way in this

language left no room for mistaking the character of the accusation and what the government expected to prove. All the notice that justice, or common sense, could ask, had been given the

defendant.

Indeed, the charge

matter, instead of aiding in the per

petuation of the evil, and its inevitable augmentation. A STORY OF CHIEF JUSTICE FULLER

itself

made it clear to every mind, that it

NUMBER of years before the late Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller was appointed

was proposed to show the company engaged in the sort of business referred

presided, at the request of a Chicago coroner,

to

the

United

States

Supreme

Court,

he

at an inquest at which one of the jurors, after to.

This, however, had not been set out,

formally, in an extra lot of legal verbiage,

the usual swearing in, arose and pompously objected against service, alleging that he was the general manager of an important concern