Reprimand

Sometimes a lawyer employed in some public cause betrays the honor of his calling by offensive methods and is scored in the press. But perhaps never before in the history of the American Bar has any gentleman of the profession received such a devastating reprimand as that which the New York World, on its editorial page, launched last week at the barristers employed in the suit of Leonard Kip Rhinelander against his wife, Alice Jones.

The World said:

"However inglorious the role of Leonard Kip Rhinelander in this suit at White Plains, it is his lawyers who cut the poorest figure in the case. For obviously this was an affair that ought to have been settled out of court. No matter what the outcome, there was nothing to be gained by trying the suit; no matter what the Rhinelander family may have thought they were doing when they began the suit, good lawyers, lawyers devoted to the larger interests of their clients, lawyers conscious of their responsibility as members of the court, would have found ways to make the Rhinelanders realize what the case would lead them into ....

"The realities of the affair lie in a realm of feeling of which the actors themselves were hardly aware, which the wisest doctor and the most discerning priest would need years to explore before they could half understand it. The attachment was a pitiable thing, the horrible confusion of a sexually uneducated boy and a socially uneducated girl with greed and social position and an uncertain racial standard and a kind of weird search for happiness. . . . Apparently his family lacked both sympathetic wisdom and practical judgment. But the lawyers were not emotionally involved. They could have kept their heads, and if they were any good they could and would have talked like a Dutch uncle to these pathetic people stumbling to their ruin. They should have led them to adjust the matter out of court. Things like that are done every day for the protection of the innocent and to the immense advantage of the general public. But every once in a while, as in the Rhinelander case and the Stillman case, an affair which the courts cannot handle is dragged into court by lawyers who like litigation more than they care for the happiness of their clients. . . ."

The chief Rhinelander attorney is Isaac Newton Mills. He was born in Connecticut in 1851; in school he was known as a wrangler; at Amherst he had a reputation for vigor, for honesty, for plain speech. Admitted to the bar in 1876, he began to practice law in Mount Vernon and Manhattan. For six years he was an appellate justice.