lead us into more difficulties than we have ever had, but if it means simplicity, if it means unification whereby a lawyer may go into court more nearly knowing what the pleadings ought to be and what the procedure will be in the case, if that is true, I don't think there is any disagreement among this body, but when it comes to the matter of adopting a resolution on uniformity, I think it is a matter we want to go into very much. The Chairman: Is there anything further along this line? Judge Robinson, of West Virginia: I would like to inquire what is the attitude of the body towards the Clayton Bill. The Chairman: We have a motion before us that is foreign to that. The motion is to refer to the Executive Committee, in order that they may formulate some action or recommend the necessary measure or measures or any recommendation that might be thought advisable on the subject. Judge Robinson: Of course, you will have to pardon me because I didn't understand that that was the situation. The Chairman: Is there any further discussion on this motion? Judge Robinson: Then I understand the motion to be that this matter is to be referred to a committee in order that they may formulate action or do whatever is feasible to try to formulate it and recommend some method. Motion seconded, put and carried. The Chairman: On this question of the Clayton Bill, if you will pardon me a word before you continue the discussion, we had considerable discussion on this matter at Montreal and came to the conclusion then that on account of the diversity of opinion, it would be unwise to try to take action at that time. Judge Dietrich: I should oppose taking action on this question at this meeting before the question has been given to the organization. It is entirely foreign to the discussion which we have had and some of the judges have gone out under the presumption that no such resolution would be offered. Judge McClellan, of Alabama: I desire to move that the subject be continued for the further consideration of this Section at the next annual meeting. The Chairman: That the discussion shall go over until the next meeting? And the action. Judge Dietrich: Do you mean the subject itself-the discussion of the subject or the question of adopting it? Now, I have some views on adopting it that I have not expressed today because I thought it was entirely foreign. I understood that this meeting was to consider the question as to whether the court or the legislature should formulate rules, but I didn't assume that the Clayton Bill was indirectly involved in the question. Judge McClellan : My idea is to continue this subject now until the next annual meeting. Motion was seconded, put and carried. The Chairman: Before adjourning I wish to give you as expressing the sentiment of each of us to our associates here a few lines from Chicago's beloved poet, the late Eugene Field: "Here's hoping you'll all live one hundred years; yes! one hundred years, And in all that time you'll shed no tears; And! Here's hoping I'll live one hundred years less one day, For I wouldn't want to be on earth when any of you had passed away." On motion, the meeting adjourned sine die. GAYLORD LEE CLARK, Secretary. ADDRESS OF ORRIN N. CARTER, CHAIRMAN OF THE SECTION. The purpose of an address of this kind is generally twofold: First, to recall what has been done in the past, and second, to suggest what is planned for the future. The history of this organization is so brief that little can be said of its past. Most of you are familiar with its organization at Montreal and the first annual meeting at Washington last fall, as all the federal judges, the judges of Courts of Review in each of the states and many others were sent printed pamphlets containing the history of the organization and the record of its last meeting. I shall not dwell on the past and will only say that if this meeting and those of the future are as successful as the one at Washington last October, I feel confident the Section will accomplish the purpose of its organization. These meetings ought to be helpful in showing us how we can better perform judicial duties-duties than which none are more important for our country's welfare. I have always felt that no man could be a leader in our profession unless he was not only learned in the law, but well grounded in many other departments of knowledge. Sir Walter Scott, in one of his great novels, has one of his characters say that "the lawyer who knows neither history nor literature is a mere mechanic." Senator Sumner stated that " a lawyer must know everything. He must know law, history, philosophy, human nature." (Storey's Sumner, American Statesmen Series XXX, p. 8.) If this is true of the practising lawyer, it is doubly so of the lawyer who has been elevated to the Bench. He will find all his knowledge and all his experience valuable in performing the duties of his office. He should not only be familiar with the laws of his own state and country, but should have a general knowledge of those of other nations. The history and philosophy of the law should be familiar to him. He should have read what the leading writers have said upon its jurisprudence-the science of the law; he should acquaint himself with the rules followed by courts and the principles involved therein. We wonder, when we read, why some of the people were so shortsighted in our early history as to demand in 1809 that the legislature of New Jersey should prohibit the citation of any case arising in any court outside of that state, and cause the passage of an act which forbade any law book published in England to be referred to in a law suit, or why Pennsylvania should have passed similar laws about the same time. It is difficult now to understand the view-point of the Kentucky legislature of 1808 when it proposed to prohibit the reading of any British decision or elementary work on law in court, a course which only through the arguments and eloquence of Henry Clay was so modified that the legislature limited the act to the exclusion of British decisions rendered since July, 1776. (37 American Law Review, p. 1; 3 McMasters' History of the People of the U. S., p. 416 to 418.) Yet in a recent number of the Harvard Law Review, published in 1914, a judge of a court of one of our great states advises American lawyers against studying European philosophy of the law on the ground that it was so misleading that it might be harmful. Such a suggestion, it seems to me, is not dissimilar to that of a country justice of the peace in the state from which I come, who refused to permit a lawyer to read from Greenleaf on Evidence during a trial, because it was written by a man residing in another state. No nation and no people have a monopoly of knowledge of the great fundamental principles of law, any more than they have of the principles of truth. The courts and the legal profession, as we all know, have been sharply criticised in recent years. Because of the dissatisfaction with the enforcement of law, radical changes have been proposed affecting the selection and working methods of the judiciary. The agitation in favor of judicial recall and the recall of decisions is doubtless less general than it was a year or two since. The report of the committee on that special subject to the Bar Association at this meeting insists that this agitation is already discredited. Even though it be true that such agitation is declining, still it is especially important that the members of this Section continue to give careful consideration to the questions that have been discussed in the last decade, bearing on the work of the courts. Will not a thorough study of some of these questions by our profession, at a time when there is no public agitation, be attended with much better results than the changes which might be made in the heat of great public excitement? Governmental innovations, made during a time of extreme feeling, are often not well thought out. I wish to call attention to two or three questions that deserve most serious consideration by lawyers and judges. The power of the courts, now long established in this country, to decide acts of the legislative bodies unconstitutional, is a unique feature of our system of government. Most lawyers and judges in the past have agreed with Rufus Choate that the establishment of this principle, by written constitutions and the decisions of the courts, is one of the greatest achievements of statesmanship that the world has ever known. (Dillon, Laws and Jurisprudence of England and America, p. 199.) And yet the doctrine of judicial supremacy on questions of this kind has not commended itself to other nations. Germany and Switzerland have copied several features of our federal system, but they have never deemed it advisable to give their courts any such authority. During the recent discussion in the English Parliament as to the Home Rule Bill for Ireland, it was suggested that something like our Bill of Rights might be inserted as a part of such legislation, but that suggestion was strongly opposed, it being stated both in the Parliamentary debates and in the public press that this introduction of the American system into their government would choke the courts with litigation; that the lawyers would soon grow rich with such an enactment by attacking it on constitutional grounds; that the courts in Ireland, as in the United States, would become the supreme legislatures for the whole field of social and economic life; that judges were not trained for that kind of function, and that anyone who knew how this function was exercised by the judges of America would agree that such an enactment would erect one of the most galling of tyrannies. (Cohen in July, 1915, International Journal of Ethics, p. 489.) If written constitutions are to be of any permanent influence, must not some one branch of the government pass on the constitutionality of legislation? I am disposed to agree with that |