"I stand a better chance with a jury"; when
the civilian says: "If I had the wrong end of the stick give me a
jury," he is appealing not to the wrong side of the jury system, but
to a quality which is not always recognized.

Law is an exact, definite statement of principles, absolute and
apparently immutable. When a man on the street walks up to another and
wantonly insults him, the law is, that the insulted party must turn
and walk away. If the matter came before a jury they would never
convict him for knocking the other down at once. The jury system is
the mitigation of the law.

XVI

LOOKING BACKWARD

Extracts from the Graduation Dissertation of a Columbia
J.E. upon receiving his degree of Juridical Expert in 1947.

Historical investigation of obsolete customs is of little value beyond
preserving some record of what may soon be forgotten.

In the year 1947 it seems almost unbelievable that the universal use
by the public of Judicial Corporations should have been a matter of
such recent economic growth. It is interesting to trace their
development and the social causes from which they sprang.

The efficient administration of these co-operative Corporations being
demonstrated by their financial success, makes it unnecessary to
dwell upon the details of their intensely developed organization.
Existing as they do upon so broad a comprehension of the whole
commercial and social structures, it is little wonder that they have
proven their value to the community. Their highly specialized
departments of Issues, Investigation, Statutory Law, Records,
Determination and Results correspond in a measure to the former method
of procedure in the extinct courts of law and equity. Times have
indeed changed.

The analogy between the present methods and the antiquated and
conventionalized customs of those cumbersome and inadequate
institutions is not difficult to find. The department of Issues, for
example, corresponds to what was known as the pleadings in an action.
These were formerly bits of paper governed as to form by inflexible
rules, instead of the efficient method by which under the trained
managers of able minds the matters in dispute, either of fact or law,
are now narrowed down to exact points of difference. Naturally the
methods of their managers being untrammelled by outside rules and they
being men of wide experience and tact, the work of this department is
not as difficult as at the first commencem