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The Green Bag
enforcement of state laws; declaring for uni formity of laws in the regulation of trusts, and for co-operation by Attorneys-General in the correction of corporate abuses. The officers elected for the ensuing year are : president, Fred S. Jackson, Kansas; vicepresident, U. S. Webb, California; secretary and treasurer, James Bingham, Indiana. Miscellaneous More than two-thirds of the American law schools have lengthened their average course from two to three years, according to a New York educator. The fire which occurred in the Parliament buildings at Toronto September 1 totally destroyed the Mowat law library, said to be one of the finest collections in Canada. The women lawyers of Ohio will form an association in September at a conference to be held in Columbus. The leader of the movement is Nellie G. Robinson of Cincinnati. The association will have members belonging to Cleveland, Toledo, Springfield, and San dusky, as well as to Cincinnati and Columbus. The courthouse at Washington, Mason county, Kentucky, in which "Uncle Tom" of "Uncle Tom's Cabin fame" was sold, was struck by lightning and destroyed Aug. 13. The building was erected in 1794. It was the sale of the aged negro at this place that gave Harriet Beecher Stowe the basis for her story. The New York State Association of District Attorneys was organized at Albany, Septem ber 2. William Travers Jerome of New York was elected president; Beecher S. Clother of Glens Falls, vice-president, and Rollin B. Sanford of Albany, secretary and treasurer. The annual meeting will be held next Febru ary, when the pending criminal code legis lation will be discussed. The National Association of Real Estate Exchanges, through a committee on uniform laws, is considering the drafting of proposed uniform laws covering the topics of convey ancing, notarial acknowledgments, filing of lis pendens, probate, and releasing of mort gages, deeds of trusts, etc. The committee is conferring with a similar committee of the American Bar Association. The Revue de Droit International Privi had the misfortune to lose the services of its founder and editor, who died a few months ago. This valuable review, however, bids fair to continue the international studies so ably prosecuted up to the time of the death of M. Darras, and the current issue displays the undismayed energy of the new editor, Pro fessor A. De Lapradelle, who is attached to the faculty of law of the University of Paris,
and is an associate of the Institut de Droit International. On the continued excellence of the scholarship of this publication, under its able new editorship, the world of learning can confidently rely. A special committee of the New YorkCounty Lawyer's Association which was appointed to look into the requirements for admission to the bar has made a report in which it finds the present system of legal training funda mentally wrong in these particulars: "The average student when he applies for admis sion has no or a very inadequate knowledge of his various duties. The student is not in structed in the real nature and function of his office. The educational tests, preliminary and general, are wholly insufficient. Students are uninstructed in their outside unprofessional relation to the community." The report also speaks of the deterioration of the bench in New York county: "The spectacle of the ele vation to a judgeship of a lawyer known and appreciated by the bar is a rare one. If the names of most of the candidates for judicial honors were submitted to the profession they would be overwhelmingly repudiated. In the main the bench is below the average. The lawyers of New York City today freely talk of the judges. They specify names, they say to one another, 'Keep away from that court,' 'Avoid that judge,' meaning beware of their sloth fulness, ignorance, or immaturity. . . . Whether the power of nominating judges can be taken from political organizations is a question. ... So long, however, as the system exists there necessarily will be an inferior class of judges." The New York Sun denounces this criticism as an "abusive attack upon the judges," and "a misleading diatribe," and Judge Alton B. Parker, in a letter to the Sun, declares that most of the judges are really very good indeed, this being "strongly evidenced by the fact that some of the New York lawyers recently gave a complimentary dinner to the Appellate Division. The Out look laconically observes that this letter throws more light upon Judge Parker himself than upon the facts in question and explains "why he was defeated as a Presidential candi date in 1904 by a popular majority against him of two and a half million votes and by an electoral majority against him of 196 votes." But the committee is not attacking the judges personally, but the system by which they are selected. Mr. John R. Dos Passos, a promi nent New York lawyer, in a subsequent letter to the Sun, assumes responsibility for the report, and says of it: "It is the system under which judges are nominated which is in veighed against and not the individuals who are upon the bench. I am on terms of friendly relationship with all of them. They are creatures of the system. It will be a great disappointment if we do not have the support of the press of our state in an earnest effort to amend the rules of the courts relating to admission to the bar, which lawyers concede are inadequate to produce as a whole either capable lawyers or fully equipped judges."
