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pages, and what is the use of talking about five men reading all that matter. There is a physical, as well as a mental limitation upon the power of human beings to read and digest, and if you had those cases, with the facts left open, you would go from one court to the other, and finally the fifteenth or sixteenth court would possibly get back to what the first one found.

Now, I move the adoption of this report, and you can accomplish this matter of relieving the people of the impression that you have a one man court in your appellate court, and it is a fact, by adopting this suggestion. Some gentlemen say, it is contrary to your constitution. Your Supreme Court has held and passed upon it, where a party appealing from an East Tennessee County could appeal to Nashville. They have held an act of the legislature constitutional, where they provided an appealing party from an East Tennessee County could appeal either to Nashville or Knoxville. Now, some gentlemen say, what are you going to do with me, as a member of the Court of Civil Appeals? It is the question what is to the best interests of the state and the people of the state. If it involves my abolition and the abolition of the other members of the court, let them be abolished, and this, I think, will accomplish the present needs of the situation. It is not put forward for meeting just the necessary constitutional amendments, because when your constitution is amended, you can adopt a system commensurate with your people and their needs.

I do sincerely hope, for I have studied this question for nineteen years, and I know the difficulty, and any gentleman who has been on the bench knows the difficulty of accurately settling the facts in a lawsuit. There is your trouble, in ninetynine out of one hundred cases, and you have to have a finality somewhere. I move the adoption of the report, Mr. President, if I can get a second.

Mr. Carter:-I second the motion.

President Keeble:-Does any gentleman here desire to discuss that report. If no one desires to further discuss that report, then I will put the question.

Question put and report unanimously adopted.

President Keeble:-Since the adjournment of yesterday, after the action of the Association in reference to the appoint

ment of a committee to carry out the declaration as to what constituted the ethics of the Bar, I have been handed a copy of the Louisville Courier-Journal of this morning which records the suspension from active practice of four lawyers in Kentucky, by reason of violating just such ideas of propriety as were declared on by this body yesterday. This is an encouragement and an assertion of the proposition that with proper activity on the part of the Bar Association and the members of the profession, no additional legislation is necessary.

The President at this time introduced the principal guest of the Association, the Honorable James C. McReynolds, Attorney General of the United States, who delivered an address on the subject of, "The Law Business of the United States." The Secretary regrets that this address was not prepared for publication, so that it could be included within the proceedings of this meeting.

President Keeble:-I now have the pleasure of presenting to the audience, a gentleman from the Chicago Bar, distinguished in his state in many lines, who has given special study and attention to the subject before us, and which is of vital interest to every lawyer of this state, and that is, reform in judicial procedure. I now have the honor of presenting the Honorable Nathan William MacChesney of Chicago (1) who will speak on "A Plan for Modern Unified Courts."

(1) Col. MacChesney is a member in active practice of the Chicago Bar, is Vice-President of the Illinois State Bar Association; President Illinois Commission on Uniform State Laws; a Member of the Commission on Uniform Industrial and Insurance Legislation; former President, American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology; Director, American Judicature Society.

Mr. Nathan William MacChesney:-Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, when I asked the president how long he expected me to speak, he said, take from an hour to an hour and a half, but the warmth of your welcome has been such this morning, when I had the pleasure of meeting a good many of you personally, and the lateness of the hour is such that I shall not take that much time.

It was with great pleasure that I accepted the invitation

to come South and for the first time, address one of the Southern Bar Associations, because while a son of the North myself, I happen to have been born and to have lived in Illinois as the result of my grandfather having been an officer in the War of 1812 from the State of Virginia, and the State of Virginia being too poor to pay him in cash, paid him in land script in Illinois, so he came out and settled there, and we have been there ever since. But I have always felt I am something of kith and kin to you, when I get in the Southland again.

Sometimes the reception that one receives when he gets away from home, is not always so cordial, I suppose it depends somewhat on the auspices under which one comes, but I have a very distinct recollection of going west some years ago to the State of Nevada; I was then a junior in my present firm and was picked, I presume for the job so that if I lost the case, it would not be quite as hard on the firm as if my senior had lost it. A large mining machinery company in Chicago had sold some $60,000 in value of machinery to some gentlemen who desired to build up a western mining town, and the credit department had investigated the credit and the gentlemen who were given as the board of directors, so, without the usual draft, with the bill of lading attached, they shipped the machinery along upon a preliminary payment of something like ten thousand dollars and a little later it turned out that none of these gentlemen were in any way connected with the company. They made up a good board of directors, but they were not interested in the company to which the machinery had been shipped, and the company at home commenced to get a little worried, failing to get results from local counsel. Just before I left, we had an offer of settlement for the forty or fifty thousand dollars balance, in which they offered to pay three thousand dollars in full settlement of the machinery which they had and at the end of the letter was this note:

"N. B.-We advise you to accept this. The machinery is set up twenty-six miles from the nearest railroad station and we own all the teams in the county."

I went West, got off at a desolate way station in Nevada and tried to get out the twenty-six miles to the mining town in which everybody was interested because it was going to be a

boom town. Most of the people coming there were connected with business of our debtor concern, and there was not a lawyer who dared act with me. They had a statute in Nevada which prohibit the surety companies operating in Nevada, and there was not local business man who would go bond for anything we wanted to do. I called in as associate counsel a States Attorney from an adjoining county, managed to find out that the wagons had been bought on credit, and under their statute attached them, used them to haul the machinery and got it back to Salt Lake City. There was very little co-operation from the Bar and Bench there, you see.

However, I trust you will be more interested on this occasion in my visit than the Bar were there, though, what I am about to say will differ somewhat from the opinions of some of you, judging from the reports I have heard this morning, which run contrary to what some of us regard as the best solution of this question.

There is always a great deal of dissatisfaction with the Courts and the Bar, and I presume there always will be. In going over the general causes for this dissatisfaction we have sifted them down until they seem to come under the following six heads, approximately :

1. Selection, retirement and discipline of judges.

2. Organization of the judges after they are selected. 3. Selection of jurors as judges of the facts, the guidance of the jury and discrimination in its use.

4. Rules of practice and procedure.

5. Efficiency in the offices of the clerks of courts.

6. Selection, retirement, discipline and organization of the bar.

The fact of the case is that these may all be brought under one general head, and that, in the last analysis, the lack of definite responsibility, with commensurate power, is the cause for practically all the faults ascribed to courts, comprising both judges and lawyers. We have all the machinery for the administration of justice. But the parts of the machine lack coordination; there is also lacking a unity of control and responsibility. If all of the several factors in a piece of litigation, to-wit, lawyers, witnesses, jury, judge and appellate court, hap

pen to function in a perfectly co-ordinate manner, the result is good, and this occurs, to a certain extent, in every state. But if one single factor fails, the efforts of the other parts are rendered nugatory, and at the same time, the division of powers renders it very difficult to fix responsibility, and there is no superior or central supervisory power in any case, to whom complaint could be made and by whom rectification could be ordered. All these various parts operate under rules exceedingly rigid, leaving little room for discretion, and consequently, little individual responsibility. The rules are intended to compel proper functioning, and so are very prolix as well as rigid.

The fact that it is not a lack of machinery, but merely a lack of co-ordination, is revealed by a comparison with the English and Canadian systems, in which identical parts are found, and very thorough co-ordination. This co-ordination results from the fact that sufficient power is conferred to permit of doing the right thing in each and every instance of a practice which is infinitely varied.

Briefly, I am going to call your attention to an example of what may be done as shown by the salient features of the Judicature Acts as stated by Prof. Albert M. Kales of Northwestern University:

"First: The elimination of all jurisdictional lines between courts by the merging of the whole judicial power in one court and the abolition of the distinction between law and equity as a jurisdictional matter;

"Second: At the same time retaining specialization by the judge in different classes of judicial work by separating the court into divisions, each handling different sorts of causes and while permitting judges to sit in any division, keeping each judge at work regularly in a particular division.

"Third: The application of the principle of placing in an administration head and a governing committee the power to direct the energies of the judges to the work of the court, thereby fixing upon known individuals responsibility for the due administration of justice and the keeping of the judges on the bench subject to suspension and discipline.

"Fourth: The installation of a simplified practice and pro

cedure.

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