July 28.
For the current law-sitting la England, only five appeals have been down for hearing in the House of Lords. During the Easter sittings their Lordships had to deal only with nine appeals and the Hilary list was also short. This distressing lack of litigious activity is explained by an English paper as, due the main, to the present econ-amic stringency through whicn the British people are passing. The Bar has for some time been complaining. The number of briefless barristers has risen to terrible dimensions and, except for the few outstanding counsel into whose laps briefs fall in constant stream, the lot of evea most brilliant practitioners is by no means enviable. Pessimists in the Temple assert that the rosy days have passed. The cause céldbre is becoming a rarity of the first water and, if their dignity and the rules permitted, barristers would be on the dole in great force. They have however the consolation that their hard luck is giving material for much comment "in the Press. The suggestion is made, for instance, that their fees are too high and that the prospective litigant nowadays hesitates before he takes the plunge into the unknown sea of costs and refreshers.
The British people are not litigious at heart. There is 4 firmly-rooted horror of the law-courts in most classes of English society. The belief which exists in certain countries to the effect that a lawsuit is a mark of social respectability or a couvenient form of entertainment finds little support in England. Charles Dickens, more than any other writer, did much to make the Englishman shy of the Law Courts and Sam Weller's comparison of the irate Mr. Pickwick to a shuttlecock between the battledores of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg has a knack of sticking in the mind. There is possibly a feeling among the circles, from which litigants once came, that they have spent quite enough money in establishing the principles of English law. The absence of codified law has been freely cited as one of the weak points of British judicial administration. It has been conveniently rectified in great need for-a Town Hall inthe past by those heroic figures who are prepared to "go right to the House of Lords" to tle a point from which they derive no direct material bene fit and through which they will certainly suffer severe pecuniary, loss. This form of sacrifice evidently becoming less fashion able, The litigant class is going on strike, Something may have to be done about it for it would be pathetic to think of continued depression in the Inns of Court, Perhaps the barristers will work out their own salvation by me sisting on a simplification of legal procedure, more extensive codification, the creation of machinery for dealing with certainties in the law, limitation of the number of appeals and improved drafting of statutes. Those are some of the remedies proposed by a sympathetic observer of the blight of the brief~ Jess. Will they be put into force? Probably not, for the trouble about most suggestions of that kind is that, before they, have time to acquire support, the difficulty, to meet which they, were put forward, usually disappears. In other words there may be before long a revival of litigation and barristers, will once more be convinced that all is well both with Westminster and with the Strand, 1
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.