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 The Green Bag Volume XXIII

March, 1911

Number 3

The Reform of Procedure’ BY ELIHU Roo'r ENTLEMEN of the New York

procedure should be made as simple as

agree that there is undue delay in our judicial proceedings. A considerable

possible. The fewer statutory rules there are to create statutory rights inter vening between a citizen's demand for relief and the court’s judgment upon

number of able and public-spirited law

his

yers, including several committees of this Association and the local Bar Asso ciations of this state, have addressed themselves to the work of devising amendments of the law which should make our procedure more swift and cer tain in reaching the ends of justice. They have made many suggestions of great value looking to changes in the code of procedure. Some of these have been adopted, and there are pending

direct and unhampered by technical requirements the pathway of the suitor from his complaint to his judgment, the better. It seems to me that we have reached a point in our practice where the very thorough and radical action; that mere improvement of the Code of Pro cedure in its details will not answer the purpose. The original Field Code of Procedure

some, the adoption of which would be

of 1848 contained 391 sections and was

Bar:

The Bench, the Bar, and the public

of material advantage. It is not my purpose in selecting the reform of procedure as the subject for the remarks which seem appropriate on the part of a presiding officer, to discuss these suggestions or to offer others re lating to the details of the code.

I wish

rather to emphasize the general prin ciple which we will all agree ought to control the acts of the state in dealing with this subject. The principle is, that

demand,

the

better.

The

more

application of this principle requires

comprised in 169 of the small, loosely printed pages of the Session Laws of that time. The last edition of our pres ent Code at which I have looked con tains 3,384 sections, a large proportion

of them dealing with the most minute details. It is doubtless true that some provisions of substantive law have found their way into this enormous mass of

statutory matter, and that some special branches of procedure are covered by the present Code which were not in

‘This is the address which Senator Root delivered

as President of theINew York State Bar Association at the annual meeting of the Association in Syra cuse. January 19. 1911.

cluded in the original Code. Neverthe less the comparison between the two statutes reveals plainly the fact that