The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-07 00:00:00

Lawrence meets also the requirements of internal
administration. The new organisation must be
completed by a man on the spot, who shall possess
the confidence of the advocates both of the new and
the ancient syetems. Sir John Lawrence is himself
their very point of agreement. A civilian of civi-
lians, he was the one man on whom the " settlers"
relied for a comprehension of their claims, and
though ho never bore a commission, and maintained
haughtily the supremacy of civil rule, he was
obeyed by generals older than himself. A strong
governor in the old sense of the word, with a full
sense of the necessity of maintaining the absolute
power of the Government, and fully persuaded that
India can as yet be held only by the sword, he is,
nevertheless, a man who believes in justice and
progress, in railways, and canals, and free trade, in
better education and swifter justice, in fresh careers
for natives and more ample means of acquiring wealth.
Familiar with the old ideas, he has, roaring his resi-
dence at home, comprehended those upon which the
Government must now be based, and though he re-
sisted the new organisation, he will now that it
is accomplished devote himself to the task of
making it work more perfectly than the old. The
natives know him of old as one who right or wrong
is, at all events, irresistible; the Europeans will
accept at his hands the compromise in which their
claims must end; the civilians will feel his appoint-
ment an omen of a new future for themselves ; and
the army has for years studied his opinion as that
of a general made by commission higher than the
Queen's. The administrationapainfully working its
way through heaps of the debris of rotten systems,
needs an accession of force, and Sir John Lawrence
is to all other rulers what a locomotive is to a cart.
His single temptation wil lbe to crowd the work of a
life into his term of rule, but the obstacles are so
many that the only result of this foible will be a
slightly swifter advance. The locomotive will be
steadied by the weight of the train behind.
LONDON REVIEW.—A meeting of the English bar
to consider a question of law reform is so unprece-
dented an event that the grievance which brought
it to pass must be considered as beyond measure
serious. Indeed, we may measure the burden in
some sense by a pecuniary test. The hours of a well
employed barrister are golden, his very minutes are
silver; and so when some 500 members of the pro-
fession, including a large proportion of its leaders,
spend, as they did on Wednesday, a couple of hours
in affirming a statement of the need of reform, and
in taking the preliminary steps for securing it, we
may consider they have testified their sincerity by a
subscription of 1,000 guineas to the cause. Nor,
certainly, is the cause undeserving of the sacrifice.
It is not an amendment in any one special branch of
law that is sought, it is an amendment of the system
by which the whole law is established and promul-
gated. For a great deal more of our law is made by
our judges than by the Legislature; and whet the
Legislature does is, in fact, only supplementary or
corrective to what the judges have already done,
But between the huge mass of judge-made law and
the far smaller bulk of statutory law there is this
important distinction, that while the latter, what-
ever its faults, is at least immediately printed and
published by authority, the former, whatever its
perfections, is only printed at uncertain intervals, as
a mere commercial speculation, and without receiv-
ing the sanction of authority at all. So the result
is that there are above half-a-dozen different re-
cords of every point, all possibly, and frequently, at
variance in some essential particular. No lawyer,
therefore, can be sure of the law as adjudged at any
time unless he peruses all the different reports, and
their actual cost is not less than .£45. But even
when he has perused them all he cannot be certain,
when they disagree, which will be adopted by the
judge before whom they are cited. The consequence,
then, is a very heavy personal outlay and enormous
additional labour, with the result of uncertainty and
confusion. And as whatever thus affects the bar-
rister recoils upon the public, it is very evident that
the subject of which the profession now stands
pledged to attempt the reform is one in which the
public is greatly interested, and is bound to lend
the aid of its intelligent consideration. The ques-
tion is very slightly technical, it depends ohiefly
upon maxims of common sense, and we may there-
fore fairly invite our readers to review with us the
several schemes proposed. There are in the first
place some inveterate Free Traders, who maintain
the superiority of the present sy stem to any that can
be, or at least has yet been, devised. They urge
that in competition is to be ound the only security
for obtaining the best articles, that the attendance of
skilled legal reporters is the only practicable check
upon the judges, at once deterring them from pro-
nouncing bad law, and preventing them from doc-
toring for publication the bad law they may
have uttered, and that these advantages
more than counterbalance the gain which would
ensue from possessing only a single authoritative
report,whether prepared or not under the judge's eye
Then there are those, headed by Mr. Daniel, the
leader in the 'present movement, who maintain that
the business of reporting is properly the business of
the State, inasmuch as the law which is thus made
public binds all her Majesty's subjects, and who
consequently call on the State to appoint officers to
perform the duty. They would make the duty a
monopoly, by forbidding the courts to admit
any rival report, and they would make
the proper performance of the duty im-
perative by placing the actual reporters
under the immediate supervision of a committee of
the bar or the judges. Next there are some, whom
Mr. Pulling may be taken as representing, who
would have the duty in some respects subdivided,
by appointing an officer in each court whose busi-
ness should be to preserve a sufficient record of every
case, while an official reporter should extract from
the record such cases as were proper for publication,
and edit them with that view. There are others
again who would have the work taken in hand by
an incorporated body of barristers, who should come
in the place of the bookseller as bearing the profit
and loss of the work, and by these means be urged
to expedition and accuracy, enjoying some degree
of favour, but not excluding competition. The first
objection which occurs to every one of these pro-
posals is, that they contain no element which would
effectually and permanently cure the existing evils.
The official reports would still be liable to imperfec-
tion, and imperfection would invite competition. It
is idle to say that competition could be excluded by
a formal rule that none save the official reports
should be of authority or be allowed to be cited.
supposing the official report to be unintelligible, or
to contain evidently bad lave, it would be impossible
to prevent a judge from referring to a rival series
which might explain or correct it. To do so would
be indeed to enthrone injustice and error. The rule
would be at first indirectly infringed, the judge
would surreptitiously look at the unauthorised re-
port, but soon what was done in darkness would
come to the light, and the rule would be a dead
letter. Here, then, in a few months or years, we
should find ourselves brought back to our present
position, with merely the addition of one new series
to the present supply. Or if, again, we were to try
to obviate the danger of any official reporter thus
misunderstanding or misstating the import of
a case, by requiring the judge who has decided
it to revise and certify the report, we come into
the danger to which the bar showed itself at
the meeting very sensitive, that the judge may
on reconsideration alter the statement and the
argument so as better to support his own opinion.
Human nature seems to be supposed by the bar
not to become impeccable even when clothed
with ermine. Finally, all these schemes are cer-
tainly open to the objection that they contain no
security for making official persons punctual in the
despatch of their business, and consequently might
leave the profession and the public in arrear of months
or years in regard to the decisions of the courts,
save in so far as the void might be supplied by the
competition of private enterprise. Another proposi-
tion, however, was made the other day in the
columns of a contemporary by Mr. Boyd Kinnear,
a member both of the English and Scottish bar,
which, as distinct in principle both from the exist-
ing and any proposed plan, deserves to be noticed.
This gentleman argues that the real cause of the
existing evil is the want of authoritativeness in any
of the reports; that the reporters, being unable to
seq, which of the facts were considered material by
the judge, are obliged to state them all; that the
desire to omit nothing which may have in-
fluenced him leads to a rivalry in prolixity, while
the wish to give every word which drops from
his lips leads to a verbatim record of his speech, con-
taining all its incidental, as well as its pertinent
observations. He would call in, for remedy o thisde
state of things, the principle of requiring teojfu
the
himself to make, in every case, a short
authorities which were cited before him,
facts which in his opinion are material,n.andsonfdthteo
append to this note his judgment in. writing; the
whole being issued at the .t ,
pinion. 'These notes and
to the printer, a
era that there would be no opportunity for afterwards
scheme, are at once to
adaptingudgra
estl,iefacts accordingto histthoee
be transmitted by the registrar e
proof is to be sent next day to all the judges, who
would decide, not whether
by a majority the judg-
ment is good or bad law, but merely whether the case
is worth being published, and on this being settled it
would at once be published, so that in no case would
there be occasion for more than a week's delay. Mr.
Boyd Kinnear anticipates in the carrying out of this
system no great delay or difficult • as he urges
that the judge's note-book at present contains, or
ought to contain, such a note of the relevant facts as
is all that would be required for a report; while the
practice of writing the judgments would conduce.
ahnedtgreatereompe;
ibtrinenvitwynnalnddbanccetkreacctyn
thinks,
observesks't theirtie. t
ally excluded, for no other reporter could expect to
el-Plain the judge's meaning better than himself, or