"Task of Sisyphus"

Discussion at the assembly of the American Law Institute, at Washington, was chiefly related to two re- ports : One on classification of the law by Roscoe Pound, Harvard Law Dean; another on defects in criminal justice by Herbert S. Hadley (Chancellor of Washington University, St. Louis, and onetime Governer of Missouri), John G. Milburn, of New York, and William E. Mikell, University of Pennsylvania Law Dean.

Charles E. Hughes made a speech. Extracts:

"We have in this country the greatest law factory the world has ever known. Forty-eight States and the Federal Government are turning out each year thousands of new laws, while at the same time the courts in the performance of judicial duty are giving us thousands of precedents--175,000 pages of decisions in a single year, an average of 12,000 or more statutes each year and an average of 13,000 or more permanently recorded decisions of highest courts each year.

"Liberty under law, but under how much law?

"This institute represents a movement of hard-boiled idealists--with faith to remove mountains. We are seeking first of all to aid in the simplification of the law, as announced by the courts, through an analytical and constructive restatement: not as a code, not to have the illusory certainty of a legislative enactment, but as a source to which judges and lawyers may resort for precise and comprehensive information, possessing the only lasting authority, that of learning and accuracy. It is a colossal undertaking; some might say it is the task of Sisyphus* ...

"Some judges of great intellectual power, conscious of their integrity and with implicit faith in their own judgment, may think that written opinions are largely unnecessary, but the Bar knows that the best security of good and faithful work is that the judge must state his reasons. And the judge himself knows how often first impressions and even decisions passed in the conference room meet their Waterloo when the judge finds 'they won't write.' The essential test is adequate statement of grounds.

"... The main trouble with the volume of litigation is thus not with the courts, but with the legislatures. The evil resides not merely in the number of laws. It is in badly drawn laws. It is also in the compromises of legislation where the contests of opposing policies are satisfied by ambiguous phrases which transmit the difficulties of legislative bodies to the courts, who are left with the burdensome task of discovering the legislative intent, when actually there has been no defined legislative intent. . . .

"Perhaps the greatest need of all is the improvement in the administration of the criminal law by certainty in its definition and celerity in its administration. ... I remember 30 years ago hearing a lecture by Andrew D. Whitet/- on The Problem of Murder in the United States. Mr. White showed by statistics that there were probably 50,- 000 unconvicted murderers in the country. I do not know what the statistics show today, but I imagine that the problem is aggravated.

"... The vast majority of our fellow citizens, the great masses of the people, obtain their idea of American justice from the minor courts, from the magistrates' courts, from municipal courts, the tribunals that are well called the poor man's courts. Here is a special trust of the lawyers to use their full influence to assure an inexpensive, speedy, expert administration of justice where the courts most frequently touch the lives of the plain people."

* Sisyphus--in Greek mythology, a king of Corinth, condemned in Hades to roll uphill a huge stone that always rolled down again.

/- Andrew Dickson White--onetime President of Cornell University, later Ambassador to Germany, died 1918.