500
The Green Bag
times greater than in the case of the Negotiable Instruments Law. Under no circumstances should a pro posed code be submitted to the legisla ture for adoption until the work of the committee has at least reached that stage where it is reasonably well satis fied that the logical distribution of the laws to their proper codes has been accomplished, and that the codes have been so far completed that they will harmonize with and properly supple-
ment each other. Preferably a single report of the committee should present the entire system of codes for legislative action. And under no circumstances should the legislature attempt to tinker with the codes. They should either be adopted as presented by the committee, or re turned to the committee to be modified by that body in certain specified par ticulars and again submitted for adoption or rejected in toto.
Manila, P. I.
The
Rules of the Game By A. G. Zimmerman 1
IT 1 Judge WAS of Dane a fine County old legal Court, celebrity Madison, Wis. of a Middle Western state, — now pass ing the last decade of near a century of active life in the equable climate of the Pacific coast, after emerging from the Civil War a Brigadier-General, and sub sequently presiding on the bench, mostly in the appellate court, for some forty years — who, in volume 29, page 183 of the reports of a state whose volumes now number over 150, gave expression to the following language: — The question is not alone, What is the natural and inherent justice of the case? but it is, are the principles and rules of equity sufficiently broad and comprehensive to reach the case? The great jurist was legally, and per haps even equitably, right, of course; but the quotation suggests the proposi tion that "natural and inherent justice" does not in the least enter into the judicial calculation of probabilities in a cause, unless it is "justiciable" in the sense
only that it is within the settled tech nical rules and precedents of the machinery of the law. Certainly! one can get justice in a court of law or equity — if the case is "justiciable" and comes within the estab lished court-made rules and precedents. Otherwise, the justice seeker must keep out of a "court of justice." Clear and simple, is it not? If you are within the rules of the game, you may have a chance to get justice — if there is no other unlooked-for technical hitch. Otherwise, you must pay up and shut up! Or, get justice after the manner of the Middle Ages, or of the more recent far West, and then if per chance successful get locked up or hanged as a finale. The judge of the Orphans' Court was perplexed. He was perfectly clear in his mind as to what he ought to do — to do justice. But the thing that troubled him was, How could he make
