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In the reaction from the strict law, which is marked by the rise of the court of chancery and the development of equity, the tradition that a good lawyer was a bad Christian, started by clerical jealousy of the lawyer in the Middle Ages, found willing ears, Again, the nineteenth century, a period of maturity of law, insisted upon detailed rule as a means of securing the social interests in security of acquisitions and security of transactions. Where the seventeenth century insisted upon identifying law and morals, the nineteenth century, thinking of its economic structure resting on property and contract, insisted on differentiating them and on strictly defining their respective provinces. Hence in the reaction which has set in throughout the world, the reaction which European observers are calling the socialization of law, the tradition, begun in the twelfth century and handed down by the seventeenth century, is furbished up and given a new dress and once more becomes popular.

Only less important in keeping alive a lay conception of law as a mass of arbitrary technicalities, used, if not devised, to defeat justice, is the necessary difference between law and public opinion with regard to their respective rates of growth. In a sense, Spencer was well warranted in calling law a government of the living by the dead. We must pay a price for certainty and uniformity in judicial administration. If we refer the judge to the formulated moral sentiments of the community expressed in laws, forbidding him to apply his personal ethical views where such formulations are at hand, we must recognize that only a fixed and settled public opinion may be formulated effectively, and that when it is so formulated, there can be no change until a change of public opinion has become complete and a new fixity has been attained. While moral or intellectual or economic changes are in progress, but before they are so complete as to have formulated new legal standards, an advanced confident and clamorous minority may easily berate the backwardness of the general public in reality, while in appearance berating the obstinate conservatism and inveterate technicality of the lawyer. In periods of rapid growth, such as the seventeenth century and the present time, this backwardness inherent in a system of rules is felt acutely by the best minds in the community, and the timeworn tradition as to the lawyer gains ready acceptance.

The lawyer of to-day can no more obstruct the current of social ideas rushing into our law from without than the seventeenth-century sergeant at law could hold back the infusion of moral ideas into law through what he conceived to be the arbitrary action of the chancellor. As the common-law lawyer learned to sit as chancellor, to administer equity as a system, and to take hold of the new ideas and give them legal form, so the lawyer of to-morrow must master the social sciences, must receive and grasp the ideas developed therein, and must show us how to systematize and legalize them. For much as the layman scoffs at the lawyers in this connection, at heart he relies upon them.-From address by Hon. Roscoe Pound, before West Virginia Bar Association.

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DESTRUCTION OF OPIUM AND LAYOUTS IN LOS ANGELES.

Thirty-five thousand dollars worth of the dope which mirrors enchanting visions was set on fire in the Old Plaza, together with many pipes,

some of them valued highly.

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