The Green Bag Volume XXIII
March, 1911
Number 3
The Reform of Procedure’ BY ELIHU Roo'r ENTLEMEN of the New York
procedure should be made as simple as
agree that there is undue delay in our judicial proceedings. A considerable
possible. The fewer statutory rules there are to create statutory rights inter vening between a citizen's demand for relief and the court’s judgment upon
number of able and public-spirited law
his
yers, including several committees of this Association and the local Bar Asso ciations of this state, have addressed themselves to the work of devising amendments of the law which should make our procedure more swift and cer tain in reaching the ends of justice. They have made many suggestions of great value looking to changes in the code of procedure. Some of these have been adopted, and there are pending
direct and unhampered by technical requirements the pathway of the suitor from his complaint to his judgment, the better. It seems to me that we have reached a point in our practice where the very thorough and radical action; that mere improvement of the Code of Pro cedure in its details will not answer the purpose. The original Field Code of Procedure
some, the adoption of which would be
of 1848 contained 391 sections and was
Bar:
The Bench, the Bar, and the public
of material advantage. It is not my purpose in selecting the reform of procedure as the subject for the remarks which seem appropriate on the part of a presiding officer, to discuss these suggestions or to offer others re lating to the details of the code.
I wish
rather to emphasize the general prin ciple which we will all agree ought to control the acts of the state in dealing with this subject. The principle is, that
demand,
the
better.
The
more
application of this principle requires
comprised in 169 of the small, loosely printed pages of the Session Laws of that time. The last edition of our pres ent Code at which I have looked con tains 3,384 sections, a large proportion
of them dealing with the most minute details. It is doubtless true that some provisions of substantive law have found their way into this enormous mass of
statutory matter, and that some special branches of procedure are covered by the present Code which were not in
‘This is the address which Senator Root delivered
as President of theINew York State Bar Association at the annual meeting of the Association in Syra cuse. January 19. 1911.
cluded in the original Code. Neverthe less the comparison between the two statutes reveals plainly the fact that
