OF THE TWENTY-NINTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE Maryland State Bar Association HELD AT HOTEL CHELSEA JUNE 26, 27 AND 28, 1924 PUBLISHED BY MARYLAND STATE BAR ASSOCIATION 1924 The first session of the Twenty-ninth Annual Meeting was called to order at 10 o'clock by the President, T. Scott Offutt. THE PRESIDENT: Gentlemen of the Maryland State Bar Association, it becomes my pleasant duty to convene this, the 29th Annual Meeting of the Maryland State Bar Association. The opening number of the program is a somewhat dreary prelude to what, I think, will prove to be a very attractive meeting. The opening feature you are required to suffer because of precedent and the Constitution of the Association and, in these post-constitutional days, I suppose we must be bound by the Constitution. CONTEMPT OF LAW Address by JUDGE T. SCOTT OFFUTT The Constitution of this organization has imposed upon you at this time the wholly unmerited punishment of listening to an address by your President. It is, I admit, an ungrateful return for the honor you have conferred upon me, but it is the law, and as lawyers we are bound by the law. To select a theme which would present anything new in conception or in treatment to this body I realized was a hopeless undertaking for me, and I was therefore remitted to travelling over oft-trodden ground, no matter what topic I selected. Under those conditions I felt that I could do no better than submit for your consideration some reflections upon a subject which while tirelessly discussed is nevertheless of the most vital and immediate interest to all who are concerned in the permanency of our institutions, the well-being of the people and the stability of our government. I refer to the wide-spread and deep-seated contempt for the law, its processes, its officers and its machinery which today pervades the people of this nation. For many years it has been usual for students of the social system of America, lawyers, jurists, statesmen and publicists, lay and professional, to compare the character of our people for peace and good order with that of the people of other nations, and to compare the observance of law in this country with the observance of law in other countries, and always to our discredit. And in accounting for that phenomenon, they have usually, too, compared our systems, methods, and manner of administering and enforcing the law, with those of other countries and again nearly always to our discredit. And nearly always they have assumed that we are more lawless than other nations because our enforcement and administration of the law is weaker and more inefficient than in them, in other words that our lawlessness is the product of a weak administration and an inadequate enforcement of the law. If one may presume to differ from a conclusion which has been reached by so many men of distinguished ability and full knowledge, it seems to me that the conditions to which they attribute responsibility for the evil of which they complain, if they exist at all to the degree which they assume, are but surface indications of a deeper and more serious disease, to wit, a national indifference to, if not an actual contempt for the law. But before submitting my reasons to you for that belief, I want to refer for a moment to the evidence supporting the premise upon which they rest, which is, that in proportion to our population the law is violated oftener in America than in any other civilized country, and that that condition if it is not actually growing worse is at least not perceptibly improving. First in general importance it seems to me is the report of the special committee on Law Enforcement named by the American Bar Association of which the Hon. Charles S. Whitman, of New York, was the Chairman, which presents the results of a most careful and comprehensive examination of available data upon crime and criminal prosecution in the United States in recent years. It is not exhaustive, because, as it states, this is the "only great civilized country" which does not preserve its criminal statistics, but what has been preserved is sufficiently illuminating for the purposes of this paper, as will appear from those parts of the report which I have taken the liberty of quoting: It "We believe that our results are reasonably accurate. thus appears that while the general population of the country from the year 1910 until the year 1922 has increased 14.9 per cent, the criminal population has increased 16.6 per cent. In other words, the increase of the criminal population has a little more than kept pace with that of the population at large. "From correspondence with the police officials and clerks of the criminal courts in 48 leading cities of the country, we ascertained that the growth of crime in the country was steady and almost regular up to our entrance into the World War; that during the war crime decreased greatly, but upon the resumption of peace, criminals resumed their depredations with increased activity all over the country. "Replies from court officials and police officials develop two important facts: Since 1921 there has ensued a slightly greater ratio of convictions in, the courts; more activity upon the part of the police officers as shown in the number of arrests; and a perceptible awakening of public interest in the subject of law enforcement; much of which result, we respectfully submit, may be attributed to the influence and leader |