The Judge

When Justice John Richard Caverly had finished reading the record of the Leopold-Loeb trial a fortnight ago, he "retired" to "think out" his duty under the Law and to write his brief opinion, and even friends were kept away from his door. So, it is said, the world was shut out of his mind. Alone, with the essential facts of the testimony and the applicable points of law, as raised by opposing counsel, he decided whether two human beings should live or die, a responsibility usually shared by the twelve men of a jury.

Few judges have become widely known because of the part they had in any given trial. Sir George Jeffreys, Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, "whose yell of fury sounded like the thunder of the Judg ment Day," after presiding (1685) at a series of trials known to history as the "bloody assizes," gained what Macaulay has described as "an unenviable immortality." (Macaulay's History of England, chapter IV.) Kenesaw Mountain Landis, tsar of professional baseball, became a national character when, as U. S. District Judge, Northern District of Illinois, he tried (1907) the Standard Oil rebate cases and impressed a fine of $27,000,000 (a new world's record). But scores of lawyers to one judge have made enduring public reputations out of participating in one famous case. Almost everybody associates the names of William Travers Jerome, as prosecutor, and those of Delphin M. Delmar and Martin W. Littleton, as counsel for the defense, with the several Thaw trials. Hundreds of people today can tell you that James W. Osborne prosecuted (1900) and John G. Milburn and George Gordon Battle defended Molineux. But even lawyers have to turn to the files of old newspapers to find out the names of the judges who presided at these famed trials.

The judiciary today, in its function as interpreters of the Constitution, is, as President Coolidge said last week in his Baltimore speech (see Page 1), the guardian of the people's liberties. But, when the procedure of our trial courts was being framed, judges were the last instruments of tyranny. They did the will of arbitrary rulers long after armed retainers, docile sheriffs and standing armies had lost their terrors. To protect society against

Lord Jeffreys, the procedure of a trial, especially a criminal trial, was designed to check the power of the judge and to increase the importance of counsel and jury.

And yet, the power of a judge is very real, his responsibilities are very great, and his qualifications should be very high. "He is supposed," writes Judge Wells in his thoughtful book, The Man In Court (Putnam), "to know the law, at least he ought to know court procedure and the law of his state thereon by heart. In New York State, for example, the Code of Civil Procedure is 500,000 words long. He is bound to take judicial notice without being told of all the statutes of the State Legislature, which are being passed at the rate of 600 a year. He is also supposed to know the laws of the U. S. and to be thoroughly familiar with the latest decisions of the Supreme Court of the U. S., and those for the past 125 years. He must understand and look as if he knew beforehand any decision of the courts of his own state cited, which are conveniently and neatly printed in 219 New York Court of Appeals Reports, 173 volumes of the Appellate Division Reports, and 96 volumes of the Miscellaneous Re ports, to say nothing of the opinions and decisions which are not printed at all. His knowledge of the law is a fearful and wonderful thing; he must have an oceanic mind."