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THE GREEN BAG
first reported case of their violation (so far as the writer knows), where an Israelitish woman's son blasphemed, they put him in ward until Moses learned by divine direction that he should be stoned.1 Even the ten commandments, therefore, lacked efficient force until the penalty was attached. These, then, are the desirable changes in the existing codes of ethics, if they are to be adopted in that general form. But they will still lack what seems to the writer the essential virility of an effective sanction. The need of an efficient Code and its essential features.
As already indicated, the writer has sug gested what seems to be better adapted to present conditions. Let us pause to con sider the ancestry of the existing codes. The American Bar Association's report already cited traces them one and all, except the Louisiana Code, back to Sharswood's Legal Ethics, founded on a series of lectures delivered in 1854 in Philadelphia, to prospective lawyers of that city. While the writer does not, perhaps, adequately appreciate the proverbial Philadelphia law yer, he has always pictured him as a com bination of keen intelligence, legal acumen and the highest conceptions of professional duty. Certainly the Philadelphia Bar in 1854 was not permeated with ambulance chasers, nor, presumably, did its practi tioners employ, nor were they employed by, cappers and runners; nor, if I mistake not, did they have a lien on their client's cause of action, which they could enforce for their own benefit against his opponent. These appear to be the outgrowth of a later civili zation. Judge Sharswood may be pardoned if he did not foresee them, and contented himself with reasoning about the intellectual problems presented to the lawyer by specific cases within his ken. Nor is Alabama to be blamed if, in 1887, it adopted his views, contracted into fifty or sixty definite canons, for presumably 1 Leviticus xxiv, n.
at that time Alabama' too was a homogeneous community, where the law was an honorable profession, and not a trade, and where the practices of many races and of commer cial craft had not destroyed notions of ethical standards, nor introduced practi tioners actually ignorant that there might be such standards. And the other Bar Associations which have codes (excepting Louisiana), have merely adopted the Ala bama Code with a very few changes appli cable to local conditions. But now a generation has arisen that "knows not Joseph ": it follows the law as a trade. A well known justice of the Supreme Court of New York is stated to have said at a dinner a few years ago, in substance, that according to his observation law was ceasing to be a profession, and be coming a trade. At the annual meeting just past, of the New York State Bar Asso ciation, one of the committees reported that the business of ambulance chasing had now assumed such a progressive form, that the ambulance chaser in the most advanced cases is no longer either a lawyer or his runner, but a layman who pursues the business on his own account, and sells out his cases to the highest bidder among the lawyers. Can it be conceived that Bar Association codes, without penalties, couched in sweet words and full of intellectual pabulum on the duty to the poor and oppressed, will ever percolate within the reach of this gentry? It is they, and their like, that are bringing the practice of the law into disrepute, by disreputable practices, and that without let or hindrance. Schools for the education of witnesses in. accident cases, with working models of machinery, are said to have been discovered in operation in New York, prepared to demonstrate accidents that never happened. Men have confessed that they were em ployed by litigants to serve on juries, by falsely impersonating talesmen, possibly, and even probably, with the knowledge of the attorney. Do learned codes of ethics.
