Layman Ruggles

Lately the Honorable William Howard Taft, Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, was moved to write a letter to a man unlettered in the law. In closing this letter, which was made public last week, Judge Taft said, "You could do no more important work for the body social and politic than this. As one in the community I write to thank you."

The gentleman addressed was Charles F. Ruggles, timber and salt man of Manistee, Mich. The reason he was addressed, and Lawyer Elihu Root of Manhattan wrote a letter similar to Judge Taft's, was that both writers had read a declaration of the officers and directors of the American Judicature Society in which it was revealed that Mr. Ruggles was that society's conceiver, founder and patron.

In 1912, Mr. Ruggles employed an editor in his town to make a survey of the country's courts. Scanning this survey, Mr. Ruggles noticed that Chief Justice Harry Olson of the Chicago Municipal Court was a man who kept tab on the work done and undone in Chicago courts, and who had made a practice of assigning judges to the places in which they were most needed at given times. Judge Olson's records and audits showed that the law's delays were thus greatly reduced in Chicago. It was simply a matter of an executive's being responsible for the direction of a judicial force to eliminate idleness here and overwork there.

Mr. Ruggles put off for Chicago and asked Judge Olson to be chairman of a national society to promote this kind of executive direction in other courts. Judge Olson accepted and the American Judicature Society has since, as Lawyer Root said in his letter, served as a model for a vast amount of research. But only last week was it realized in high places that a public spirited layman was responsible. Only last week did Judge Olson declare: "No individual has contributed more toward court reform in the last 50 years than Mr. Ruggles."