Ang.
Liivixe as we do in Shanghai in the midst of an almost bewildering variety of judicial systems, we have a special interest in the recent visit to England of Mr. Taft, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. This is the first occasion, we believe, on which a Chief Justice, as such, has gone abroad to inquire into a different judicial system, although on many occasions, during the past ten years especially, other Federal Court judges have visited England with a similar intention, namely, the study of how we get through the work of litigation. They have returned without ex-the celerity- and efficiency of English procedure, and the opinion is said to be held by the leading lawyers of America that the English procedure is probably fifty years in advance of that of the United States. Since he assumed the position of Chief Justice Mr. Taft has been active in the movement for reform of the Federal Courts, and following his visit we may look for far-reaching proposals to be placed by him before the Bar Association of America and translated thereafter into legislation. How necessary is the reform towards which he is working may be deduced from cases occurring here in Shanghai, for in taking an appeal from the United States Court for China to the Ninth Cir-cult Court of Appeals a lawyer is to-day compelled ito follow rules of procedure which were in force prior to 1800. That these rules can be consonant with present conditions is hardly probable, in fact we know from inquiry that they are not.
Much that is fascinating pertains to the story of the reform of the judiciary in Fingland. Originally alt actions at law, except those in Chancery, had to be instituted purchasing ai original wi otherwise a mandatary letter under the Great Seal, and by the time of Henry IIT this led to a peculiar state of affairs. In that reign the number of forms of action became extremely limited because the clerks in Chancery considered that they had no authority to issue an original writ for which they could find no precedent. From this time on ways and means had to be devised to overcome that difficulty, and the result was the gradual creation of a huge complicated superstructure of methods, rules and legal fictions before which the litigant must have trembled. One of those fictions, invented by an ingenious judge who saw no other means of trying an action of title to land, was the creation of those now celebrated litigants, Richard Roe' and John Doe, whose assistance has now been invoked for generations. The outcome of all these additions to the original scheme of litigation was that by the beginning of the nineteenth century the law of England was overburdened by complicated rules and so surrounded by pitfalls that probably only the most
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.