PROCEEDINGS. PRESIDENT WOOD: Before the Chair puts the motion to adjourn made by Mr. Moses, he desires to call the attention of the Association to the fact that there are two reports on yesterday's program that went over by adjournment last night; they are, the report of the Committee on Judicial Administration, and the report of the Committee on Procedure in the Supreme Court of Illinois; they will be taken up this afternoon under the head of Miscellaneous Business, or when the program for today has been completed, and it is to be hoped that those Committees will be ready to report this afternoon. The motion to adjourn was then carried and a recess taken until 2 o'clock, P. M. AFTERNOON SESSION. The Association reconvened at 2 o'clock, P. M. PRESIDENT WOOD: The special order for this hour is the report of the Practice Commission, by Judge Gross. JUDGE GROSS: Mr. President and gentlemen: It has been said that the members desired I should speak so they could hear me; I will try and do so. From the program that was prepared by the Executive Committee, I thought I observed that this number was to occur on yesterday afternoon, on which occasion I saw to it that a very respectable audience was in attendance, but by some mischance or another, they evaporated before the Chairman called the order. One of the prime objects of my appearance before you on this occasion is that I should do a proper thing, I being your representative upon the Illinois Practice Commission, by reporting to you the progress that has been made. But the further object which I have in mind, and which I hope will meet your approval, is, that when I shall have concluded PROCEEDINGS. what I have to say, you will find in it something that shall provoke discussion. I do not ask hostile criticism, but I do ask consideration and discussion. As your representative upon that Commission, I have one prime object, and that is to carry out your wishes. As I read the joint resolution, the spirit of it contemplates that the Commission shall, by public meetings, held in different parts of the State, come in contact with the members of the Bar and of the Bench of this State, and gather from them what changes, if any, in the practice and procedure in our courts, are desirable and ought to be called to the attention of the Legislature. That duty we have, in a measure, performed. We have held several public meetings in Peoria, in Galesburg, in Chicago, in Springfield, in Danville, and in Mt. Vernon. But before I enter upon the more formal presentation of what I wish to say, let me say a word to you about the personnel of the Commission. A more happily constituted Commission, I imagine, never existed; the members of it are lawyers, not politicians,-they are rendering the service they do render voluntarily and purely for the public good. They have been drawn from the different classes, so to speak, of the bar, not specialists, any of them; perhaps all of them may be said to be good, all-round lawyers, and yet in our intercourse with one another, it very soon developed that there were fields of the law in respect of which each one of us had borne a different part. We came together, and we took up the suggestions that were presented to us, either orally by the members of the Bar, or in writing. Those suggestions number four hundred. We have, at our meetings, passed upon only onehalf of that number of suggestions. The work of the Commission then, even to the extent of considering and passing upon the suggestions that have been presented to us, is only half done. A year ago I had something to say to you about this then proposed Commission, in which I took a pessimistic view. I am not today prepared to say to you that I am full PROCEEDINGS. of hope of any very considerable result being attained as the result of its work, but some good may be accomplished; I hope so. I am willing to bear my share of the labor and my share of the responsibility, let the result be what it may. As you would naturally expect, the Commission were not always able to agree, they were not always a unit upon various propositions, and during the course of our intercourse we have had plenty of discussion, and some of it pretty sharp. We have gone over the ground, we have considered these various propositions that were submitted to us, but I want to say to you, gentlemen, that we have had one object in view, and that has been, so far as lay within our power to furnish adequate means by which that object might be attained as directly as possible, as speedily as possible, as economically as possible, both to the litigant and the counties and the State. That object, gentlemen, has been the working out of justice between man and man, and between the public and the private citizen. There is no other excuse, as I see it, gentlemen, for the institution of courts, for the providing of all the machinery attendant upon courts; no other justification for the heavy tax burdens that are cast upon the people for the maintenance of courts and court officers, unless it be found in the fact that justice thereby is to be reached. One of the questions that engaged more time and attention than any other, in the public meetings we held, arose out of the suggestion that was submitted to us that the law in respect to written instructions, as we now have it, should be changed, and that we should in this State return to the common law practice of oral instructions. It appeared from the testimony of the gentlemen of the Bar and of the Bench of this State that it was not uncommon, in the progress of trials in our common law courts, that the Judge should have submitted to him anywhere from ten to eighty written instruc PROCEEDINGS. tions for him to pass upon in the course of the trial of a casethink of it a moment, gentlemen, eighty instructions, we are told, is not an uncommon circumstance in the courts of Cook County. Those of us who are not so fortunate as to reside in Cook County know that while in the rural counties and the country courts that high number may not be reached, still the number of written instructions that are daily submitted to the court to be passed upon by the court before the jury can be permitted to retire to consider their verdict, is an absurdly great number. The work, the labor, the effort on the part of skilled counsel to lay in the instructions a trap to catch the trial Judge, and the effort on the part of the Judge to guard the court against the possible reversal that always stares him in the face, are some of the things that are encountered daily. Gentlemen, the Commission, after a very thorough consideration of this question, voted down the suggestion, and the Commission stands today with no recommendation to present to the Legislature for any improvement in that regard. Some suggestions were made looking to limiting the number of instructions that might be presented, but no scheme of that sort came to us in such shape as to commend itself to our judg ment, and nothing of that sort so far has been attempted by the Commission. Up to this time, of the two hundred propositions that have been submitted to and been passed upon by the Commission, there are three classifications: First, propositions that have been tentatively agreed to,-agreed to unless, for some good reason, we are satisfied that we ought to change. Second, propositions that have been referred to different members of the Commission to be taken up by them specially, and so the judgment of the Commission withheld or reserved for the present, and, Third, propositions rejected. I propose to present to you, not all the result of the work of the Commission, but enough of it to enable you to take up and con PROCEEDINGS. sider, as I hope you will this afternoon, so far as you can. you can not fully do so this afternoon, I ask that you may, at some other time, forward written communications to the Commission, telling us wherein we have erred, and suggesting something better than what has been presented to us, or than that which we have agreed upon. The other most important subject, as we looked at it, for our consideration, was the regulation of appeals. The right of appeal was not a common law right, it rested in the statute, and along with the growth and development of the law in this State, there have come various provisions for appeals, indeed, in almost every class of cases. All attempts made to reverse the judgments or decrees of the trial courts, for the purposes of this discussion will be referred to as appeals, not meaning thereby to exclude writs of error, but to include. It has seemed to us from what we know personally, and from what has been brought to our attention as members of the Commission, that more time is wasted, more delay is caused, more expense incurred, and oftentimes to the defeat of justice itself, by the defects in our system of appeals, than most any other thing. In what I shall present to you upon that subject I desire further to say that the scheme, as I shall present it to you, has not, in its entirety, been passed upon by the Commission; there are elements in it that seemed necessary to be incorporated in the scheme before it was presented for the consideration of our brother lawyers, that we have not settled upon. One of those, I may say, is the attempt to limit the final jurisdiction of the Appellate Court, now $1,000. Shall it be raised; if raised, to what limit? The Commission as yet is at sea upon that proposition, but to the extent we have gone, and with some filling in which I have taken the responsibility as a member of the Commission, to supply, having in view the desirability of presenting to you a scheme that shall be more or less complete in its details, I present it to you; and I especially desire that you shall take it up and consider it and |