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The Green Bag
example, lose rights or incur liabilities with respect to commercial paper by acts or omissions that have in them no moral quality and that in the particular case have worked injury to no one; none the less if he has disregarded the law he must suffer the penalty it imposes. This conventional law should then be made to conform as closely as possible to the habits and usages of those affected by it so that a knowledge of it sufficient for everyday purposes may be acquired in the mere routine of life. The presumption of knowledge by everybody applies not alone to the sub stantive law which declares the rules of human conduct, but as well to the formal law which governs the practice and procedure in cases when that conduct is brought before the courts for judgment. Everybody is presumed to know how a suit should be instituted, how prose cuted and how defended, and how taken to and through the various appellate tribunals which may have cognizance of it—that is, everybody is presumed to know these things except those who are specially learned therein, the lawyers who try the cases and the judges who decide them. The lawyer must be faith ful to his client in the conduct of the cause and beyond this must have, not a perfect, but just a reasonable knowledge of the law and must show a reasonable measure of skill in the use he makes of it. He is responsible if he is disloyal, incompetent or negligent, but not if simply mistaken. The requirement as to the judge is only that he be honest. However he may err, he cannot be held individually responsible for the conse quences. The litigant, untrained in the law and unused to its mysteries, must bear the burden of the blunders of the court and counsel, grievous as these may be. For the mistakes of the court he may have
a costly and partial redress by appeal to a higher tribunal, while for the mis take of counsel he has, in the case itself, no redress at all, and outside of the case none that is greatly worth while. In State v. Jones, 12 Mo. App. 93, the St. Louis Court of Appeals did indeed hold that the gross ignorance, incompetence and imbecility of counsel for a defen dant accused of murder, by reason of which the defendant was deprived of essential rights and advantages guaran teed to him by law, necessary to bis proper defense and inseparable from a fair trial, constituted sufficient cause for setting aside a conviction and granting a new trial. But in a later case—State v. Dreher, 137 Mo. 11—of conviction of murder and sentence to death, the Supreme Court denied this, saying:— The neglect of an attorney is the neglect of his client in respect to the court and his adversary. The decisions are too numerous to cite; but their uniform tenor is to the effect that neither ignorance, blunders nor misapprehension of counsel not occasioned by his adversary is ground for setting aside a judgment or awarding a new trial. The rule is founded upon the wisest public policy. To permit clients to seek relief against their adversaries upon the alleged negligence or blunders of their own attorneys would open the door to collusions and would lead to end less confusion in the administration of jus tice. The business of the courts cannot be conducted on any other terms than that parties must be held by the acts of their attorneys in their behalf in causes in which they are authorized to appear, and in the absence of fraud, leaving the client to his remedy against the attorney for his negligence. The court said that State v. Jones was an instance of a hard case making bad law, and while they doubted not that justice had been done there, they could not give it sanction as a precedent in practice and procedure, and it was accordingly disapproved. Just how the defendant who has been hung because of the negligence of his
