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The Green Bag
a net of form. The public estimate of
plaints; and with the whole force of the
the profession of the law is lowered.
general concurrence of that rude com
Public confidence in the administration of justice is weakened. The general
munity, he required the persons com
effect of this great mass of statutory
provisions as a whole is not to facili tate, but to impede and hamper the courts in rendering prompt and efficient justice. All this is wholly unnecessary. Our courts desire to do justice; they are
competent to do it; and they will do it if left to themselves under the guidance
of a few simple, fundamental rules and unhampered by a multitude of statutory requirements.
They are perfectly com
petent to regulate the procedure before them by their own rules, which they can
adapt to the requirements of the cases that arise, so that whatever is necessary in any case to secure the ascertainment
of the facts and the application of the law to them shall be done, and so that
nothing else shall be required. I have always thought that Judge Stephen Field's printed but unpublished little book called “Early Days in Cali fornia,"
was
most
instructive
to
a
student of the law. In the early period of the great gold excitement of 1849 some fifteen thousand men, mostly miners, found themselves collected in the
mining camp of Marysville. In that hitherto almost unpeopled region there was no government and no adminis tration, there were no ofiicers of the law, and there were no laws of which anyone there knew anything. The need of gov
ernment was apparent and the miners got together and elected Stephen Field Alcalde of Marysville. Under that title he proceeded to hold court. There was no procedure. There were no laws to describe or define his powers. There were no statutes or precedents estab lishing the rights of the parties who came before him; but he heard com
plained of to answer. He tried and determined the issues. He enforced the judgments. He tried and punished offenders against those rules of right conduct which obtain generally in civil ized communities, and he rendered jus tice to the satisfaction of Marysville
and the peace and order of the com munity. It may be useful sometimes and it is refreshing always to look out from the refinements and subtleties of our sophisticated system for adminis tering the law upon some simple and
direct and swift enforcement of the fundamental principles of justice, and to question whether in all our elaborate contrivanoe of means to attain this end
we may not be obscuring and forgetting the end itself. The real strength of the tendency to make provisions for arbitration of dis putes in the rules of business organiza tions, rests upon a feeling that, if the members of the particular trade or branch of business can get away from lawyers and the law's delays and the cumbrous technical and expensive procedure of our courts, they can have the
merits of their disputes determined swiftly, certainly, inexpensively and ade quately. I am inclined to think they are generally right. Consider the recent development of law administration in the Public Ser vice Commissions, and the Interstate
Commerce Commission of the United States. They have not yet embarrassed themselves by any code of procedure. They have not had time.
Yet they are
hearing and determining in a most ade quate and satisfactory way questions
of fact and law of the most complicated nature and of vast importance. It would be difficult to conceive of
