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cost of from eight to ten million dollars a year of the judicial system in New York City he says:

This is not due primarily to the salaries of judges. For example, in the Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, out of the total cost of the administration of justice in the Supreme Court only 22 per cent represents the salaries of the judges of that court. In other words, the salaries of the justices of the Supreme Court in the Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx are not quite $1,100,000, while the salaries of the clerical force are nearly $1,300,000, and in addition to that there is a salary list of nearly $700,000 per year for the attendants of the courts. On the civil side of the Supreme Court in the Boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, the salaries of the judges are $660,000 a year. The salaries of their clerks are $774,000. The salaries of their stenographers are about $290,000, and the salaries of their attendants are nearly $660,000. . . . There has been built up a great unorganized and unintegrated body of subordinates, the volume of whose annual salaries substantially exceeds the salaries of the judges themselves so that in every case that is tried-for example, the Supreme Court of this state, within this county or the county of the Bronx-it costs the people of the county more for the attendants and clerks than it does for the judge who presides over the trial.

A badly organized business is always wasteful. I quote these figures regarding the administrative system of the courts to illustrate this fact. Under the judiciary law of New York-a thing of shreds and patches-the judges themselves have nothing to do with the salaries of these attendants or employes, and still less to say about the necessity of employing them. A considerable percentage of these employes are unnecessary. They neither assist the judges nor the litigants in judicial business. With a unified Supreme Court in New York, with actual control over judicial functions and administrative functions exercised by the court itself, and the so-called judiciary law of the state relegated to the junk heap, we might expect, in place of unnecessary clerks and attendants and with the money saved by their elimination, masters corresponding to the thirty-two masters who now serve in the English courts to the very great expedition of judicial business. The great need for judicial organization is of course in the large cities. Life there is complex; judicial machinery must be made adequate for the demands made upon it. When we consider the total lack of organization of courts in New York City, it is a wonder that conditions are not much worse than they are. Consider the situation.

First, look at the civil side. We begin with the Municipal Court, in which the rights of the poor are heard and determined.

The court has no organization; it has a nominal chief justice, who has no powers of any substantial kind; it has clerks who are substantially independent of the judges and can be removed only on charges filed with the appellate division of the Supreme Court, and after a trial as cumbrous as an impeachment. Its judges are chosen by election in separate districts. Some districts invariably elect incompetent judges of a low character; others, men of excellent standing and professional attainment. To give the public the benefit of the mixture the judges rotate from district to district. Their jurisdiction is limited; the calendars in some districts are so crowded that litigants have to spend two or three days of attendance before they can hope to be heard. In other districts, there is comparatively little to do. Each judge runs his own court to suit himself. The court has power to make minor rules of little importance, its rule-making power being circumscribed both by the act under which the court is created and by the great complicated Code of Civil Procedure, which still perplexes New York lawyers.

The next court to be considered is one which though called the City Court of the City of New York, sits only in the Borough of Manhattan, and performs such functions as are elsewhere performed by the County Courts in other counties embraced within the city. There is no logical reason for its existence as a separate court. It has a nominal chief justice who has no adequate powers and the rule-making function of the court is like that of the Municipal Court.

From these two courts appeals run to the so-called appellate term of the Supreme Court. Printed cases must be prepared on City Court appeals, while a typewritten copy of the record will do for the Municipal Court appeals to the same Appellate Court, composed of three Supreme Court judges, who change from month to month-a most unsatisfactory Appellate Court.

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In counties other than Manhattan and the Bronx, we have County Courts, even less unified than the Municipal or City Courts. From these courts, appeals for no logical reason run not to the appellate term, but to the regular appeal division of the Supreme Court, to which appeals from the Supreme Court itself go. Supreme Court itself—the highest court of original jurisdiction-is the only court having original equity powers, composed of twentyeight original judges, having no chief justice, no power to make its own rules to meet its own practical requirements and dependent

upon the appellate division of the Supreme Court for rules-in other words, the Appeal Court makes the rules for the Trial Court. Instead of the Supreme Court judges being relieved, as the English judges are, by having procedural matters handled by masters, the Supreme Court judges must pass upon between sixty and seventy thousand motions, applications for orders and the like annually. They must daily spend half an hour at least of judicial time calling calendars, passing upon excuses for unreadiness and the like. Each justice is expected to hold court as though no other branch of the court existed. The result is, for example, that far more jurors are summoned to the parts trying jury cases than can possibly be used, all of which would be unnecessary if jurors were called not to one of these parts but to the Supreme Court itself and parcelled out to the various parts of the courts as needed. These Supreme Court judges rotate; they try equity cases one month, negligence cases another, contract cases another, with an occasional transfer to the trial of criminal causes or to duty as appeal judges in the appellate term. There is no specialization of function and no attempt at making experts in chosen branches of the law.

When one considers the organization of our local courts, which I have only partially and roughly outlined, the necessity for reorganization becomes obvious. We need a judicial system. We have over-developed the notion of judicial independence. We need to supplement it by the creation of a responsibility, of the judge to an organization, of which as an individual he forms a part. Back of the recall of judges, there remains a crudely expressed idea-the creation of an external responsibility to the people as a whole because there is lacking an internal responsibility, that of the judges to a judicial organization capable of effectively directing and disciplining them.

With all the reforms which have been made and which are in contemplation over matters of procedure and the like, we shall never have a fully efficient judiciary in the metropolitan district of New York until we have a unified system of courts of broad original jurisdiction, with branches to meet the convenience of litigants, unless we have for that court a responsible head, not only of its judicial but of its administrative work as well, with adequate power to assign justices to their work in accordance with their capacities and special fitness, with authority to discipline and direct clerks

and employes and to determine what employes the judicial system requires and where their services are wanted. This court must. not be bound hand and foot by the present complicated Code of Civil Procedure. It should have power to make necessary rules, having the effect of law on matters of practice. This court should have power to appoint masters, with functions corresponding largely to those busily engaged today in the English courts of justice, who can consider practice applications and motions which today require an entirely unnecessary amount of time from lawyers and judges, pass accounts and make such investigations as the court may direct.

Until we have made clear to the public the necessity for these structural reforms and until with the aid of an enlightened public opinion we have modernized the organization of our courts, we shall not have attained, in full measure, an effective method of administering justice, or have made any appreciable reduction in the cost of litigation, or in the cost to the taxpayer of the judicial system.

LOOKING FORWARD IN THE LAW

BY ANDREW YOUNGER WOOD,

Managing Editor, The Recorder, San Francisco, Cal.

The dearest desire of man and the greatest necessity of society is justice; that will be conceded, even by the unthinking. The means by which that justice has been obtained have, however, been a cause for criticism from immemorial times.

The thought of statesmen, the labor of jurists, the activities of lawyers and the hopes of litigants have been directed toward the solution of this great problem. How shall speedy justice be achieved? How shall men, under the law, best secure the rights guaranteed them by that law? The question is age old and is still unanswered, save in the striving of those who look toward the light and see visions of a day when social and economic justice shall prevail. Yet with all of the effort that has been made, little of real progress has been accomplished. Litigation drags and justice is delayed and thereby denied.

It is customary to criticize the lawyers for this condition, but as a matter of fact the most persistent advocates of simplified procedure are the lawyers. They, of all others, realize the hardships that litigants, and particularly poor litigants, suffer by reason of delay and have, therefore, bent their efforts to seeking not only relief but a remedy.

It is more difficult to persuade a legislator that procedural reforms or changes in the judicial system advocated by lawyers are desirable than it would be physically to put a camel through the eye of a needle. Yet practically all of the social and economic reforms in California in the past eight years were conceived, advocated and adopted by lawyers and with their active support and assistance. While lawyers have not hesitated to radically change social and economic laws, they have been content, as a rule, with endeavoring to adapt present machinery to the advancing needs of the times. Yet their outlook has been forward as the facts will show.

This condition is not peculiar to California but is general throughout the country. Everywhere the tendency is toward

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