The Appellate Autocrats it was because the proceedings satisfied the most exacting and technical judicial discrimination, will forever remain a mystery, but the fact is that the judg ment of the trial court was this time unanimously sustained. In the absence of a more rational explanation, it may be said the high and puissant appellate autocrats seemed to have become almost human. The result was so extraordinary and so surprising to Captain Somebody's old technical barrister, and he was so certain that the justices must have de cided the matter with their eyes shut, that he brought the case to their atten tion for the third time on a motion for a re-hearing, filing a lengthy printed brief in support thereof. But it availed the persistent Stikatem nothing. Justice — especially when one side obstinately wants it, and the other as pertinaciously doesn't — is usually slow but sometimes sure. After half a decade or so of judicial strife in behalf of his simple client, young Lawyer Tryem went back to first principles. With ax and spade he aided Simon Ordinary and the sheriff in demolishing the Somebody fence and in replacing the smiling Simon in pos session of his coveted four-foot strip, with the dour and sour-faced captain looking on. Simon Ordinary had obtained his "concrete justice." He had recovered his four-foot strip. "What was it worth," you ask? "The justice?" "O, the strip!" Well, inde pendently of its peculiar value to the house, it may have been worth as much as fifteen dollars. But Simon eventually Madison, Wis.
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got justice, which is everything. And his litigation did not cost him, in dollars and cents, much more than the value of the house and lot, either! Queries: Were Simon Ordinary an intelligent student of civic affairs, could he reasonably be permitted to at least inquire whether it is the legislators, the lawyers, the inferior judges, or — let it be said gently and deferentially — the appellate judges, who are responsible for the court-made law and legal rules and precedents? And further, whether these orderly and sacred vehicles of justice in their turn are at the root of the delays, the expenses, the denials, the miscarriages and cumbersomeness — of concrete jus tice as it is ladled out to a litigious and long-suffering humanity? Or do the real Simon Ordinarys only feel at times that there is something wrong about it all without knowing and ordinarily caring little where it is? As new, able, honest, ambitious law yers with commendable ideas of improve ment one at a time become justices, are they gradually worked over and ab sorbed by their elder brethren to become fossilized parts of the same old sacred antequated judicial machinery of courtmade technicalities, rules and prece dents? Is another Justinian or Napoleon needed to sift the legal rubbish and bring order and simplified system out of judi cial chaos? Or can the forty-nine sets of appellate justices be induced by — whisper it softly — public sentiment.to quietly and gradually in an orderly way rectify the sacred abuses, themselves? Quien sabe?
