LAW REFORM. STATE AND INTERNATIONAL. A VERY large portion of Mr. Field's public efforts have been directed to the reform of our jurisprudence. These efforts began more than forty years ago, and have been continued almost without interruption ever since. The task was of such magnitude and importance that it is hardly yet completed. The reforms proposed were the procurement of unity and simplicity in the administration of justice, by the abolition of the old, fictitious distinctions between law and equity; and the codification of the whole law, civil and criminal, substantive and administrative. The result has been the production of five codes-the Civil Code, the Penal Code, the Code of Civil Procedure, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and also a Political Code. Many of their provisions have been adopted in every English-speaking country; and it may fairly be said that it is only a question of time when the system projected by him will become the law of every country which is governed by the principles of English jurisprudence. In the domain of international law he has been scarcely less active, having prepared a complete code of international law, and having been a projector and sup. porter of the International Code Committee of America, the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations, founded in Europe, and the Institute of International Law. The following papers, reports, and addresses are selected and arranged with a view to the presentation of the origin and gradual development of the law reforms in which he has been engaged. REFORM OF THE JUDICIAL SYSTEM OF NEW YORK. FIRST part of a letter addressed to GULIAN C. VERPLANCK, Senator, December 26, 1839. SIR: The reform of our judicial system will be the most important question of the next session of the Legislature. There may be other questions, more popular in their nature, which will engross for the time more of the public attention; but there will be none whose real and permanent consequence is comparable to this, in its relation to the order, the peace, and the sound moral sentiment of society. It is of the nature of legal reform to be understood by a small class only, not merely because legal subjects are alien to the pursuits and the studies of the great body of the people, but because also the mal-organization and abuses of the judicial system fall directly upon the suitors only, themselves a small number compared with the whole population, and those, too, in general the least able to grapple with and excite general attention to the evils they suffer. The law acts upon individuals, not upon classes; the oppression, if oppression there be, is a private grief, which another does not readily make his own; the operation of the system is noiseless; the working of its machinery is scarcely heard amid the din of society; and the eye, except of the attentive and practiced observer, fails to perceive how it works, how complicated it is, what delicate adjustment it requires, what nice adaptation of parts, at once the most complex and the most potent of all the engines by which society is regulated and moved. It is difficult to draw general attention to the subject; how difficult, no one knows whose profession or whose particular studies have not brought him into acquaintance with it; and the reformer, too sensible of the evils and the wrongs of the present system ever to acquiesce in it, may find, nevertheless, that he has raised an ineffectual voice, drowned in the more noisy debates on other subjects, going on around him. It is not to be disguised, moreover, that there are intrinsic difficulties in the way of combining a learned, dignified, and impartial, with a cheap and speedy administration of the law—difficulties not too great to be overcome, but sufficient to deter the indolent and the timid. The judicial system which prevails in this State has come now to be so inefficient for good, and so productive for evil, that some remedy is indispensable. It is in the hope-perhaps a vain one-of contributing something toward a real and permanent remedy, that I write this letter. Your position as a member of the Senate, the prominent part you have already taken in the discussions of the subject, and especially your speech at the last session, developing the most mature and best explained plan of reform which the discussion has given occasion to, lead me to think it not improper to address myself directly to you. |