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The Green Bag

expedient as an all-sufficient remedy would be a foregone conclusion. A NEW LAW SCHOOL REVIEW THE Georgetown Law Journal, the first issue of which appeared in November, will be welcomed to the ranks of law school journals. As the edi tors rightly say, Georgetown is not newly arrived among the leading law schools of the country, and the publication of a review should perhaps earlier have been attempted. The first number contains articles of timeliness and importance. Frank J. Hogan's discussion of "The Patent Monopoly" is extended and use ful. The standard set is high, and we doubt not that the Green Bag will often have occasion to direct the attention of its readers to noteworthy matters in the pages of the Georgetown Law Journal. MR. DOOLEY'S OPINION OF OUR CRIMINAL PROCEDURE MR. Dooley's reflections, "On Trial by Jury," make it apparent that the discussion of defects in criminal procedure has by no means escaped him. He is struck by that contrast between England and America which so often serves as a text for elucidation. "Th' laws an' th' language ar-re th' same in th' two counthries but they're pro nounced diff'rent." In England, he says, a man is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty, and they take it for granted that he is guilty; in this country he is presumed to be guilty until he is proved guilty, and after that, is presumed to be innocent. This seems to imply that the legal burden of proof and the actual burden of proof do not coincide. Whatever presumption of innocence a prisoner may be entitled to at law, it may be disregarded in the actual conduct of a trial; this is what

Mr. Dooley would say, and he is un doubtedly voicing a common opinion of laymen that the criminal law is administered with other purposes than the single-minded aim of detecting the guilty and protecting the innocent. He plainly considers the English system to bear too heavily on the innocent, and the American system to be too lenient to the guilty; and each system seems to him as bad as the other. But it is not of the traditions of the criminal law that he makes mockery, but rather of their supposed neglect and abuse, and thus he joins the ranks of those who would like to see the ideal of the common law perpetuated and justice impartially administered in accordance with timehonored principles. Mr. Dooley's estimate of English criminal procedure is warped by a too evident anti-British prejudice, which serves as a means of averting unpopular comparisons to the disadvantage of our own courts of law. His picture of the method of trial is extravagant and whimsical in both cases, but it is the American system which really has most to fear from his satire. No truthfulness in the description of the English judge will be recognized. We all know that he refrains from anything which might influence the jury regarding the merits, in his analysis of the evidence, and his charge does not deserve to be burlesqued in this fashion: "Pris'ner at th' bar, it is now me awful jooty to lave ye'er fate to a British jury. I will not attimpt to infloonce thim in anny way. I will not take th' time to brush away th' foolish ividence put in in ye'er definse. Ye'er lawyers have done as well as they cud with nawthin' to go on." Outside comic opera, an English judge whose instruction to the jury could be para phrased in this strain is inconceivable. But the description of the American