The Editor's Bag WOODROW WILSON AGAIN the office of President of the United States is to be filled by a lawyer, whose public utterances render it safe to predict that he will be zealous in upholding the best traditions of the judiciary and the highest ideals of the legal profession. Problems of legislation will receive the study of an alert and dis ciplined mind, and the American people will have in Woodrow Wilson a trained advisor and competent guide of a special equipment not often duplicated in public life. The problems that confront the country can be solved only by patient, laborious investigation, and no one is likely to feel the truth of this more than the next President, or to seek greater assurance that the work of the Govern ment shall be carried on in the proper spirit. TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDERS THE new rules adopted by the Supreme Court with reference to preliminary injunctions and tem porary restraining orders are perhaps not so much to be viewed as a departure from previous practice as a formulation of usages adopted by the federal courts with pretty fair consistency in some typical jurisdictions. The prohibition of the issue of preliminary injunctions without notice is less significant than it would be were the loophole not left open for the granting of temporary
restraining orders without notice. The procedure with regard to preliminary orders may without violence be as similated to that in the case of final injunctions. The significance of the new rules appears to lie chiefly in the fact that they standardize the procedure with regard to temporary restraining orders, and lay down definite and uni form regulations which now for the first time enable the respondent in such proceedings to know to exactly how long notice he is entitled and how a prima facie case is to be made out against him. Section 718 of the Revised Statutes of the United States provides as follows : Whenever notice is given of a motion for an injunction out of a circuit or district court, the court or judge thereof may, if there appears to be danger of irreparable injury from delay, grant an order restraining the act sought to be enjoined until the decision upon the motion, and such order may be granted with or without security, in the discretion of the court or judge.
We have not had time to ascertain whether this section is retained word for word in the new Judicial Code; that is immaterial. The section first ap peared in an act passed in 1872, before the revision of the statutes, and recog nized a practice existing before that time, which Congress put into a statutory form. The federal courts have since continued, under its authority, to issue temporary restraining orders without notice and hearing, when confronted with threatened irreparable harm. The new rules do not diminish the powers of the courts to issue such orders
