4. Juries.

5. Trials.

6. Appeals.

All matters which were presented to the conference at the first meeting were referred to the appropriate committees.

Prior to the second meeting in December, 1925, the various committees met to consider the business which had been referred to them, and at the second meeting comprehensive reports were made by the several committees and the matters were fully considered by the conference, but final action was not taken, as the legislature does not convene until January, 1927, and it was desired that the members should have further time in which to consider the recommendations contained in the report.

The third meeting was held in June, 1926, and the reports of the committees were further considered, and the committees were directed to put into the form of bills to be submitted to the legislature, the recommendations embodied in their reports, and to submit these to the meeting of the conference to be held in December for final action, prior to the convening of the General Assembly in January, 1927. All reports and drafts of bills will be sent to the members 30 days prior to the meeting of the conference.

I will say that the procedure followed by the conference is very similar to that of the conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws.

The conference as now constituted is composed of 46 members. It is thought by some that more effective work could be done by a smaller body, but it may be that the apportionment of the work among the six committees will overcome this difficulty, and besides a recommendation coming from the entire judiciary of the state and attorneys selected by the Governor from every judicial district will have greater weight with the legislature than a recommendation from a smaller body.

The meetings of the conference have been largely attended. Many matters of importance have been considered, the profession and the press are keenly interested in the work of the conference, and it is confidently believed that such recommendations as the conference may make will be enacted into law by the legislature.

Carrington T. Marshall:

I assume that President Long, in asking me to discuss this matter after the three set speeches, desired to have the reaction of the audience to the things that were set forth in those set speeches. Surely we have heard enough about the judicial council so that I may be pardoned if I leave that out of the discussion entirely.

My notion is that efficiency as applied to justice, like efficiency on any other subject, means activity; it means energy, or, as the gentleman from North Carolina has suggested, it means getting results.

Now applying that more concretely to the subject of justice, it seems to me that it should mean "obviate the laws delays." That is only one of the inefficiencies of the administration of the law. The other is defeating justice by the resort to worn out forms and senseless technicalities.

So far as the judicial council is concerned, I am unable to learn that a council in any state in the union has any power whatever. Real power would consist in being able to state active rules which the courts would be compelled to conform to.

On the other hand, every judicial council that has been created in every state of the union, so far merely has the power to suggest and to recommend. Our own council, different from Massachusetts, has only power to recommend to the legislature.

I practiced law for 28 years before I was elected to the Bench, and I have had five and one-half years experience on the Bench, and I have proceeded in that five and one-half years to put into effect some of the things that resulted in injustice to my clients during the 28 years of practice.

And let me tell you one or two things. The pronoun "I" will have to be used rather freely in the next few minutes, and I hope you will pardon that, because I cannot tell the story in any other way.

About two years ago, our court had under review a judgment of one of the trial courts of the state where the jury reached its verdict by tossing a coin. Of course, that only occurred after all argument had failed, but the trial court, followed the old rule which was established more than 150 years ago, without any logic at all, and which has been followed by the courts of the

United States with but two or three exceptions during that time, to wit: That no inquiry may be made into the proceedings of the jury during its retirement.

Well, the jury had retired and reached its verdict by tossing a coin, and the verdict was received and the jury discharged before anything further was known about it, and then the parties began to work and a majority of the jurors told the story, and affidavits were filed, but the trial court stated that they could not receive such evidence to impeach the trial jury's verdict.

In other words, that they could not stultify themselves, and the majority of our court, following precedent, held that they could not interfere because that rule had been established so long that it could not be broken otherwise than by declaration of the legislature.

I filed a vigorous dissenting opinion. I did not take that view of it, and I take issue upon that point now. That sort of a process certainly had nothing to do with the merits of the case, and I thought that the court did have the right to set that old rule, unsupported by logic, aside and so correct the rule. But the remarkable part of it was that our own court in at least two or three decisions prior to that one had already held that jury deliberations might be investigated in criminal cases, thereby drawing a distinction between civil and criminal cases.

So much for that branch of the discussion.

The legislature of Ohio has fixed periods for certain processes, a certain time for the summons, a certain time for filing brief, and records and all of those things. To make a long story short, after a struggle of two or three years we have succeeded in establishing new rules of the court whereby we have shortened that period from a period of 270 to 170 days, and not being satisfied with those rules we have so far progressed that we are now deciding cases and announcing decisions within four months after the Court of Appeals has rendered its final judgment, and in the spring of the year, when we have caught up with the work of the court, we uniformly decide those cases within 60 days. When we adjourned court June 1, there was not a case on the docket that had been filed 60 days before.

I do not state those things with great pride, because I think that period is still too long. I see no reason why our decisions

should not be rendered within 30 days after the decision of the intermediate court. It happens so in England.

The work of our court is completely up to the minute so that if an emergency case comes in we may set it for hearing and decide it. To illustrate: a controversy had arisen between the Highway Commission and the Finance Director of the state which was resulting in the tying up of about five million dollars' worth of road work; that would mean the breaking up of some twenty or thirty responsible contractors, and cause the failure of several banks, and what was equally important, the highway work would have been delayed until the following spring, leaving the roads in an impassable condition.

They came to our court and asked for an early hearing, and I asked their opinion, and they said they would like to have a hearing in 30 days, and my reply was " file your brief tomorrow, we will hear it the third day"; and we decided it the fourth day; that is, the case was on our docket just four days, and there never was a more important case decided, in my judgment.

I state these things not boastfully, but to show that the procedure should rest with the courts and courts should act upon their own initiative and cast aside useless forms and shackles.

NATIONAL ENCROACHMENTS AND STATE

AGGRESSIONS.

BY

THOMAS JAMES NORTON.

OF THE CHICAGO BAR

In the last few months much has been said in the press and on the platform in warning against the tendency of the states to abdicate some of their proper constitutional functions and transfer to bureaus in Washington the management of their local affairs. The alarm has been well sounded, even though it came somewhat late.

That the supreme law of the land was changed profoundly four times in seven years is in itself enough to put us in a thoughtful mood. A fifth proposal by Congress brought out a resentful rejection by most of the states.

In the popular education which has been going on through discussion of national encroachments on state authority no one has called attention to the simultaneous aggressions of the states upon national prerogative and upon the rights of men and property. For it is an informing fact that while the states, through their representatives in Congress and their legislatures at home, have been ready to give or barter their birthright to the nation, they have steadily attempted to circumvent the guaranties of the Constitution in many important fields. A review of those aggressions, along with the national tendency to usurp (or in devious ways to achieve) power not given by the Constitution, is the plan of this discussion; and the purpose is to show by living instances that the founders of this Republic knew the history, the inherent nature, and therefore the habits of power as well as they knew the alphabet.

My proposition is that governmental power today, if unbridled by constitutional prohibitions, would be exactly as it was when Tudor or Stuart sovereigns trampled the Englishman under foot, when Bourbons, wearing high heels painted red, drove Frenchmen to destitution and ferocity, when the House of Savoy made of Italy a beggar, and when the Hohenzollerns recently taught the