Rules From on High

By the time an evil gets into a proverb it is generally old and notorious beyond repair. Such are "the law's delays." For ;25 years bar associations and public men have been trying to speed up court actions. One big cause of court delays are arguments over practice and procedure. One half the questions on which Federal Appellate Courts must rule concern procedure alone: Federal Courts are guided by a complex and undigested mass of laws passed by Congress, of judicial decisions and diverse practices in 48 different State courts. Although every President since William Howard Taft has joined the American Bar Association in pleading for Congress to cut the tangle, nothing much happened until last week. Then President Roosevelt, a better master of Congress than most of his predecessors, had the satisfaction of putting his signature to a new law.

Just as dozens of New Deal laws transfer power from Congress to the President, so the new Federal Procedure Act transfers power from Congress to the U. S. Supreme Court. Heretofore that august tribunal has worked reforms only in the matter of speeding up appeals from below. Henceforth the Supreme Court will fix rules of procedure in all Federal Courts-- conveniently simple, workable, and uniform rules that can be changed without legislation when conditions demand. In drafting its rules the Supreme Court will probably have the help of a special assistant to the Attorney General and heed the advice of the bar. If, as expected, it does its job well, its procedure may well become standard throughout the 48 States, thus tending to unify and speed up all trials in the U. S.

Said President Roosevelt: "The enactment by the Congress of this measure . . . represents one of the most important steps ever taken in the improvement of our judicial system." Only those lawyers who count on the "law's delays" to win their cases for them disagreed with him.

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