606
The Green Bag
Another Iowa lawyer uses an un conventional letter-head, in which he inserts the words :— "Red-Headed Legal Napoleon of the Slope. Happy But Not Satisfied. References, My Enemies—They are Unbiased. Fees are the Sinews of War.”
and for that reason,——and that reason alone, the case had to be dismissed. No single right would have been lost had the case gone to trial on the indict
ment.
In the event the government
had failed to show that the defendant
company was engaged in interstate THE LAW MADE RIDICULOUS
IN
the cases
recently
instituted
against the National Packing Com pany in Chicago, failure to insert a half-dozen words in an indictment undid the work of weeks——of months.
Lengthy investigation on the part of government officials; extended sessions
of a special grand jury; examination of witnesses from widely separated sections of the country; weeks of labor by lawyers, and the paying out of enormous sums of money,-——all counted
for nothing simply because a grand jury had overlooked a trifling averment, in making its return to the court. The prosecution, in the formal pre sentation of the case, neglected to set up an obvious fact, namely: that the defendant was engaged in business having to do with interstate com merce! There were hundreds and hundreds of
business, then there could have been issue against, and the assumption that
there was an effort making to prosecute for an offense which could not exist made necessary a most wretched con tortion of human reasoning. Still, the judge in his ruling in the case, did nothing more than follow the law. In the face of such occurrences
as this——and they are numerous——is it at all surprising that our courts are
congested with “business," and that it is next to impossible to secure a prompt
and satisfactory administration of jus tice? Is it at all surprising, either, that the public is fast becoming disgusted with the law, as a means of punishing
crime, or adjudicating civil differences? And there is nothing strange that we find the President of the United States, himself one of the foremost lawyers
words in that indictment—words that
of the country, protesting against sense less judicial delays. Is it not about time we were getting away from webs woven about our courts
repeated over and over again, what the defendant had done, and wherein it
of justice, by centuries of practice and precedent? And the lawyers of the
was charged with violating the law. Its
country should lead the way in this
language left no room for mistaking the character of the accusation and what the government expected to prove. All the notice that justice, or common sense, could ask, had been given the
defendant.
Indeed, the charge
matter, instead of aiding in the per
petuation of the evil, and its inevitable augmentation. A STORY OF CHIEF JUSTICE FULLER
itself
made it clear to every mind, that it
NUMBER of years before the late Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller was appointed
was proposed to show the company engaged in the sort of business referred
presided, at the request of a Chicago coroner,
to
the
United
States
Supreme
Court,
he
at an inquest at which one of the jurors, after to.
This, however, had not been set out,
formally, in an extra lot of legal verbiage,
the usual swearing in, arose and pompously objected against service, alleging that he was the general manager of an important concern
