American Bar Association The committee also made the report that the Law and Equity bill, which has had the support of the Association since it was drawn by the committee in 1911, has failed of passage. The bill promotes the transfer of suits between the equity side and the law side of the federal courts. The committee took the position two years ago that whatever reason may have originally existed for limiting the right of appeal from the highest state courts in cases involving the construction of the federal Constitution had ceased to exist, and the Association then endorsed a proposed bill permitting a right of review in the Supreme Court whatever the de cision of a state court as to the consti tutionality of a state statute. This bill has again failed to pass Congress. These three bills have again been introduced in the present Congress. That the Special Committee is thor oughly alive to its responsibility is proved by its serious consideration of a number of important subjects, espe cially the judicial construction of wills during the life of the testator, the ser vice of process by mail, enlargement of the powers of courts of equity to enable them to give real effect to their decrees, the preservation of the right of the fed eral courts to stay proceedings in state courts, and the maintenance of their power through injunctions unimpaired by any class exemption in favor of labor unions. Symposium on Procedure A symposium on "The Struggle for Simplification of Legal Procedure," in which three distinguished speakers joined, was an interesting feature of the meet ing at Montreal. It was opened by Federal Judge William C. Hook of Kansas, whose subject was "Some Causes." The keynote of Judge Hook's
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paper is to be found in the motive from which sprang the remark he quoted from Hilaire Belloc: "The Professor of Psychology was a learned man, and his sense of reality was not always exact." Thus lawyers need to cultivate a fine sense of the realities of life, they need to avoid the prolixity and subtlety to which their profession predisposes them in an age of such complicated mechan ism as our own. "The true critic, the one who does not boil at too low a temperature or see red, who regards the good beneath the evil and would cure, not destroy, has a useful and im portant place in society and his lash must sometimes cut to affect a hardened, customary wrong. I speak of the criti cism which is impersonal. ... It is but fair to say that some of the criti cisms of the judiciary are due to a misconception of their appropriate func tions. In the army of progress they should not be scouts far in advance to explore the way, nor on the other hand should they ride in the rear with the sutlers to whom permanent rest is profit and enjoyment. But when ground is gained by the great body and occupied, there are law and order and the seats of justice." The true nature of private property as an institution ordained for the com mon welfare was recognized in the second paper of the symposium, read by Judge N. Charles Burke of the Maryland Court of Appeals, on "Legal Procedure and Social Unrest." The economic war fare of the present time, he said, is waged between the two opposing camps of excessive individualism and socialism. The relations between capital and labor, he said, are a moral question primarily, the solution of which must be based on an application of principles of justice. The principal causes of the present injus tices which have been inflicted upon the
