The American Judiciary

The oldest which survives of our American Constitution, that adopted by Massachusetts in 1780, requires the appointment of judges to be made by the Governor of the State, with t...

The Supreme Court of the United States can entertain original actions of certain kinds.[Footnote: See Chap. IX.] A few also of the State supreme courts of appeal have a limited...

Courts of Claims are the only permanent special courts for the disposition of causes arising from the acts of public officials.[Footnote: One exists for the United States; and o...

The American system of criminal procedure rests on the principle that the government should decide on the propriety of beginning all prosecutions, and then should bring and main...

Government is a device for applying the power of all to secure the rights of each. Any government is good in which they are thus effectually secured. That government is best in...

Every judicial officer of a State is required by the Constitution of the United States to bind himself by oath or affirmation to support it, and this obligation compels him to r...

Every lawyer is an officer of the court as fully as is the judge or the clerk. He has, indeed, a longer term of office than is generally accorded to them, for he holds his posit...

The antipathy to legal codification, which, until recent years, was a characteristic both of the English and American bar, and still prevails, though with diminishing force, has...

As governments must provide some authority to declare what the unwritten law governing any transaction was, so they must provide some authority to declare what the written law g...

No government can live and flourish without having as part of its system of administration of civil affairs some permanent human force, invested with acknowledged and supreme au...

The great bulk of litigation is confined to the civil trial courts, that is, to courts for the trial of ordinary causes between man and man. It also has its seat in the trial co...

To have a trial by jury is, as a general rule, the right of every man who sues or is sued in court on a cause of action not of a kind to be disposed of in a court of equity or a...

Americans are proud of their country and of their State. They are proud of their scheme of government, by which an imperial world-power has been created for certain national and...

No court can with propriety pass a decree which it cannot enforce.[Footnote: Clarke's Appeal from Probate, 70 Conn. Reports, 195, 209; 39 Atlantic Reporter, 155; 178 U. S. Repor...

The pecuniary limit of jurisdiction was for a hundred years fixed at $500. The increase to $3,000 was due partly to the fact that the Supreme Court was overburdened by appeals f...

The State Constitutions differ fundamentally from that of the United States in respect to the nature of the judicial establishment. Each of the States possesses all judicial pow...

In time of war and at the seat of war martial rule is a necessity, and under such conditions martial law may rightfully be enforced by any sovereign as an incident of the war, w...

Every State has all the rights of an independent sovereign, except so far as its sovereignty is limited by the Constitution of the United States. As respects each other the Stat...

The English common law was and is an unwritten law. To find it one has to look in legal treatises and reports of judicial decisions. Its historical development has been not unli...

The right to be heard before judgment, the right to have judgment rendered only on due process of law, and the right in most cases to a jury trial, necessarily make the course o...

From the colonial system of legislatures by which all the powers of government were at times exercised to the modern American State, with its professed division of them into thr...

It is within the power of Congress to assume the exclusive regulation of bankruptcy proceedings throughout the United States.[Footnote: U. S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 8.] Ther...

The English common law regarded wills of lands as in the nature of conveyances, the due execution of which, if ever called in question in a lawsuit, was to be established then a...

The sessions of a court of record of general jurisdiction are daily opened by a formal proclamation made, at the command of the judge, by the crier or sheriff's officer in atten...

The Constitution of the United States (Art. III) provides that there must always be one Supreme Court of the United States. The establishment of such inferior courts as may be d...

A public officer, whose duties are mainly other than judicial, may be invested with judicial power to be exercised only in certain causes which may be brought before him, in dis...