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The Legal World Missouri, and Charles H. Aldrich of Nebraska. This committee was se lected at a conference of Governors last September. The brief was submitted in connection with the "state rate cases." Because the Federal Circuit Court in the Minnesota freight and passenger rate cases held the rates invalid not only as confiscatory but by reason of their effect on interstate commerce, that case was taken as the text for the Governors' protest. It was declared that what was said went directly to the right of every state to regulate state commerce. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in its -sixth annual report, urges that the states fur ther restrict entrance to the bar and work out a uniform system of rules for admis sion of lawyers to practise. It finds an increase in the number of law schools in the United States, from 96 ten years ago to 114 in 1910, without, however, any increase in the proportion of the schools giving exclusively day instruc tion in the law. This fact is considered unfortunate, as "a vast and profound subject such as the law is quite enough to engage all of the faculties of the aver age young man." The profession is also found to be greatly overcrowded. If the proportion of lawyers to the popu lation should be as great as that of physicians, 1,700 graduates yearly, says the report, would maintain the present overcrowded state of the profession, but as a matter of fact there were 4,183 graduates in June, 1910. The report draws the conclusion that lawyers are being manufactured grossly, in excess of the demand, and men are admitted to practise upon "a law basis that enables a large number of unfit and ignorant men to enter the profession." To this cause, says the report, is to be
attributed a large part of the delays in the administration of justice. Obituary
Babson, Thomas M., corporation coun sel of Boston, died Mar. 5. He was graduated from Harvard Law School in 1868, and practised law for two years in St. Louis, in the seventies. Blodgett, John Taggard, Justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island since 1900, died at his home in Providence, Mar. 4, aged fifty-three. He served for three years in the legislature. He was a hard worker as a judge, and ren dered many dissenting opinions. Finch, William Albert, Professor of Law at Cornell University, died Mar. 31, in Brooklyn, N. Y. After practis ing law he joined the Cornell faculty in 1891. He was the author of "Finch's Cases on the Law of Property in Land." Foster, David J., Congressman from Vermont, ranking Republican member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, died in Burlington, Mar. 21. He was graduated from Dartmouth Col lege, and admitted to the bar in 1883. In 1886 he was elected prosecuting attorney of Chittenden county. He later served as state senator and com missioner of state taxes. In 1898 he was appointed chairman of the board of railroad commissioners. He entered Congress in 1901 and was a member of the Fifty-seventh, Fifty-eighth, Fiftyninth, Sixtieth and Sixty-first Con gresses, being re-elected to the Sixtysecond Congress. Harrity, William F., former post master of Philadelphia, and national chairman of the Democratic party in 1897, died April 17. He was one of the most successful corporation lawyers at the Philadelphia bar, and was a
