238 TUB POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



In the second place, the courts have become the targets of adverse 

 criticism by declaring social legislation unconstitutional. One has but 

 to recall the popular disapproval aroused in recent years by the decisions 

 of the New York Court of Appeals. Laws that prevented the manu- 

 facture of tobacco in tenement-houses, safeguarded life against dan- 

 gerous machinery, limited the hours of labor of women in factories to 

 ten hours a day for six days in the week, and the Workingmen's Com- 

 pensation Act have been held unconstitutional. These decisions have 

 done much to provoke the belief that the courts are unsympathetic with 

 humanitarian measures and that they unwarrantedly interfere with leg- 

 islative discretion. 



The people believe in their courts, they admire and love many of their judges, 

 yet they feel, vaguely, perhaps, but persistently, that something is wrong about 

 a judicial system under which a few men obstruct the will and the needs of the 

 many on matters which seem to involve no question of substantial right at all, 

 so far as individuals are concerned, but only divergences of view as to what is 

 expedient and proper so far as society, as a whole, is concerned. 2 



A third fact, and one often emphasized by Ex-President Taft, con- 

 cerns the almost interminable delay incidental to judicial procedure in 

 many parts of the United States, the practically endless opportunity for 

 appeal, the frequency with which the outcome of litigation turns upon 

 some technicality of the law and not upon justice, and the fact that the 

 winner in a lawsuit is often the man with the longest purse and not the 

 man with a just cause. The legal profession is prone to procrastinate. 

 Compliance with the forms of law instils the habit of delay. To post- 

 pone action until an important witness for the opposing side moves away 

 or dies, or until some other desired event happens, is a favorite device. 

 A banker of long experience tells me that the average business man takes 

 considerably less time to settle an estate than the average lawyer. In 

 the state of New York since 1848, three out of every five cases have 

 been decided upon some point in procedure in place of being de- 

 cided upon their merits. In other words, the doing of justice has 

 been subordinated to the enforcement of technical rules. The 

 plaintiff in a divorce case failed to secure a decree because the words, 

 "Action for divorce," were written on the back in place of on the 

 face of the summons to her husband, as required by the statutory code. 

 If the action had been to recover a penalty, the "general reference to 

 the statute " should have been placed upon the back of the summons. 3 

 Failure to do justice, consequently, is sometimes due to the fact that the 

 statutory codes governing procedure leave the courts no discretion. 

 When one considers how much the usefulness of the Interstate Com- 

 merce Commission was for years impaired by judicial obstruction, it is 



2 William L. Eansom, "Majority Eule and the Judiciary," p. 36. 

 s George W. Alger, "Swift and Cheap Justice," The World's Work, Vol. 27, 

 1913, pp. 56-57. 



