methods of administration, to remove anachronisms in the law, and generally to bring the law of this State, civil and criminal, into harmony with modern conditions." Among the proposals of the Commission is one that there should be created a "Ministry of Justice," which shall be a ready and authoritative conduit through which proposals by the courts, the bar and the public for improvements in the law may be transmitted to the legislature. The Ministry will devote itself not alone to bill-drafting to avoid obscurity, uncertainty and complexity in statutes, but it will consider from a disinterested and scientific standpoint all proposed amendments and improvements in the law. The suggestion is not new, since in England it was recommended by Bentham and later by Lord Westbury and Lord Haldane. In a report on the Machinery of Government, Lord Haldane said that there was no "minister responsible for the subject of justice" and that there was a "difficulty of getting the attention of the government to legal reform, and as to the want of contact between those who are responsible for the administration of the work of the Commercial Courts and the mercantile community. Judge Cardozo, of the New York Court of Appeals, has very aptly commented upon the legislature's pre-occupation "with many issues more clamorous than those of the courts, viewing with hasty and partial glimpses the things that should be viewed both steadily and whole." Speaking of the proposed Ministry of Justice, he says: "Such a board would not only observe for itself the workings of the law as administered day by day. It would enlighten itself constantly through all available sources of guidance and instruction; through consultation with scholars; through study of the law reviews,

the journals of social science, the publications of the learned generally; and through investigation of remedies and methods in other jurisdictions, foreign and domestic."

It will be perceived that the functions of the proposed Ministry of Justice would be broader than those of the Law Institute, for they would extend to the whole body of the law, both substantive and procedural. If it is an idealistic scheme, it is yet practicable and scientific. The idea was put into effect in Massachusetts in 1924 by the creation of a Judicial Council to observe the workings of the courts of justice and to make recommendations of improvements in procedure.

In any attempt to effect general law reform in this country serious difficulties arise from the fact that in most of the matters of law by which the rights of the individual are affected, there are forty-eight jurisdictions independent of each other, as each state has its own law and method of administration. Over twentyfive years ago the American Bar Association inaugurated a movement to ameliorate the inconvenience caused by this situation. At its suggestion Commissioners on Uniform State Laws were appointed by Governors of the several states and have annually held conferences preceding the annual meetings of the Association, at which have been proposed bills "to promote uniformity in state laws on all subjects where uniformity is deemed desirable and practicable." Thirty acts have been devised or approved by the Commissioners and a number of these have been enacted. Thus fifty-one states have enacted the uniform Negotiable Instruments Law, twenty-six the Bill of Ladings Law, eighteen the Deser

tion and Non-Support Law, twelve the Fraudulent Conveyance Law, thirteen the Limited Partnership Law, sixteen the Partnership Law, twenty-seven the Sales Act, eighteen the Stock Transfer Act, and fortyeight the Warehouse Receipts Act. But it is significant that uniform acts on child labor were passed by only four states, on illegitimacy by only four states, on land registration by only three states, on marriage and marriage license by only two states, on marriage evasion by only five states and on workmen's compensation by only two states. This illustrates the difficulty of obtaining uniform legislation upon subjects affected by local, social or industrial conditions.

The work of the Commission is continuous and in due course will undoubtedly remove many of the inconveniences arising from the conflicts existing under the laws of the several states. In closing his annual address in 1924, the President of the Commission said:

"In time we may count upon the public generally recognizing, as the President of the United States has stated, that our movement is not merely legally desirable, but is governmentally indispensable if our nation, as we know it, is to continue to function in its historic form under the Constitution of the United States."

A subject which has for some time been attracting attention in this country is the administration of the criminal law. That it is not effective and prompt in the punishment of crime is generally believed. A statement on the subject by the present Chief Justice of the United States in 1909, when he was President, is frequently quoted, to the following effect, viz:

"It is not too much to say that the administration of criminal law in this country is a disgrace to our

civilization, and that the prevalence of crime and fraud, which here is greatly in excess of that in European countries, is due largely to the failure of the law and its administration to bring criminals to justice."

There is no doubt a large measure of truth in attributing to our lax system of criminal justice and its administration the responsibility for this deplorable result. Technicalities in indictments surviving from a past age; the excessive accentuation of the presumption of innocence; the retention of archaic and absurd rules of evidence; long delays in bringing to trial persons charged with crime; absurd rules relating to the examination and qualification of trial jurors, resulting both in great delay and in the elimination of intelligent jurors; the general exaggeration of the character, extent and historical development of the safeguards with which the liberty of the citizen should be surrounded;-these are some of the causes for failures in the administration of criminal justice. England, from which we derive the traditions on which our criminal justice is founded, has long since abandoned most of these excrescences.

But if all such defects as these were corrected, there would still remain obstacles to the due administration of our criminal law, founded upon certain tendencies in our civilization having no relation to the law or its administration, or to lawyers or judges. Some of these obstacles are the exaltation of the criminal, almost to the point of glorification, causing distorted views, especially in the minds of the young and unthinking, concerning retribution for wrong-doing, and stimulating in the vain and weak a spirit of emulation; the investigation and disclosure by the press of facts before indictment or trial; the improper publication of grand or

petit jury proceedings; photographic reproductions of episodes of a trial of such a character as to detract from the dignity and authority of the court; the repetition of unsubstantiated rumors relating to a case on trial or about to be tried; and finally newspaper crusades or "trial by newspaper," in which the press assumes the functions of detective, lawyer and judge, in its manifest effort to create public opinion concerning a pending trial. Some of these conditions have produced the publicity-loving judge (he does not exist in America alone), and the self-advertising lawyer, who does not hesitate to ignore the ethics of the profession in every way short of conducting himself so as to evoke the condemnation of the court.

There is far more crime in this country than in other countries having an Anglo-Saxon civilization; and to a greater extent crimes of a serious character go undetected and unpunished. But this is not wholly due to the lax administration of criminal justice. In most states of the Union the county is the political subdivision for which both police and public prosecutors are elected or appointed, and with them rests the detection of crime. When it is realized that there are 3065 counties in the country, each independent of the others, in the initial steps to detect and punish crime and in local public sentiment, the difficulty of effecting a comprehensive improvement will be realized; and it will also become plain that the problem is first political and social and only secondarily judicial.

But there are outstanding phases of the administration of criminal justice in this country which account for some of its most glaring deficiencies. These have been pointed out with striking completeness and