may be provided by law, and to exercise such other powers in special cases as are or may be provided by law.

Const. 1846, art. VI, § 16, amended in 1869.

§ 17. JUSTICES OF THE PEACE; [DISTRICT COURT JUSTICES.]

The electors of the several towns shall, at their annual town meetings, or at such other time and in such manner as the Legislature may direct, elect Justices of the Peace, whose term of office shall be four years. In case of an election to fill a vacancy occurring before the expiration of a full term, they shall hold for the residue of the unexpired term. Their number and classification may be regulated by law. Justices of the Peace and judges or justices of inferior courts not of record, and their clerks may be removed for cause, after due notice and an opportunity of being heard, by such courts as are or may be prescribed by law. Justices of the Peace [and District Court Justices] may be elected in the different cities of this State in such manner, and with such powers, and for such terms, respectively, as are or shall be prescribed by law; all other judicial officers in cities, whose election or appointment is not otherwise provided for in this article, shall be chosen by the electors of such cities, or appointed by some local authorities thereof.

Const. 1846, art. VI, § 18, amended in 1869.

§ 18. INFERIOR LOCAL COURTS.

Inferior local courts of civil or of [and] criminal jurisdiction may be established by the Legislature, but no inferior local court hereafter created shall be a court of record. The Legislature shall not hereafter confer upon any inferior or local court of its creation, any equity jurisdiction or any greater jurisdiction in any [other] respect[s] than is conferred upon County Courts by or under this article. Except as herein otherwise provided, all judicial officers shall be elected or appointed at such times and in such manner as the Legislature may direct.

Const. 1846, art. VI, § 19, amended in 1869.

§ 19. CLERKS OF COURTS.

Clerks of the several counties shall be clerks of the Supreme Court, with such powers and duties as shall be prescribed by law. The Justices of the Appellate Division in each department shall have power to appoint and to remove a clerk, who shall keep his office at a place to be designated by said Justices. The Clerk of the Court of Appeals shall keep his office at the seat of government. The Clerk of the Court of Appeals and the clerks of the Appellate

Division shall receive compensation to be established by law and paid out of the public treasury.

Const. 1846, art. VI, § 20, amended in 1869.

§ 20. NO JUDICIAL OFFICER, EXCEPT JUSTICE OF THE PEACE, TO

RECEIVE FEES; NOT TO ACT AS ATTORNEY OR COUNSELOR.

No judicial officer, except Justices of the Peace, shall receive to his own use any fees or perquisites of office; nor shall any Judge of the Court of Appeals, or Justice of the Supreme Court, or any County Judge [or Surrogate] hereafter elected [in a county having a population exceeding one hundred and twenty thousand,] practice as an attorney or counselor in any court of record in this State, or act as referee. [The Legislature may impose a similar prohibition upon County Judges and Surrogates in other counties.] No one shall be eligible to the office of Judge of the Court of Appeals, Justice of the Supreme Court, or [except in the county of Hamilton, to the office] of County Judge [or Surrogate], who is not an attorney and counselor of this State.

Const. 1846, art. VI, § 21, amended in 1869.

§ 21. PUBLICATION OF STATUTES.

The Legislature shall provide for the speedy publication of all statutes, and shall regulate the reporting of the decisions of the courts; but all laws and judicial decisions shall be free for publication by any person.

Const. 1846, art. VI, § 23, amended in 1869.

§ 22. TERMS OF OFFICE OF PRESENT JUSTICES OF THE PEACE AND

LOCAL JUDICIAL OFFICERS.

Justices of the Peace and other local judicial officers provided for in sections seventeen and eighteen, in office when this article takes effect, shall hold their offices until the expiration of their respective

terms.

Const. 1846, art. VI, § 25, amended in 1869.

§ 23. COURTS OF SPECIAL SESSIONS.

Courts of Special Sessions shall have such jurisdiction of offenses of the grade of misdemeanors as may be prescribed by law.

Const. 184, art. VI, § 26, amended in 1869.

(214)

ORGANIZATION AND PROCEDURE OF THE

COURTS1

WILLIAM L. RANSOM

Justice of the City Court of the City of New York

HAVE had before me for several days the manuscript of Mr. Jessup's suggestions and the report of the committee of the Phi Delta Phi, and have had opportunity to examine them with some care. In many respects they parallel recommendations which the bar associations are likewise urging, but you have under consideration here the coördinated plan proposed by Mr. Jessup, and I shall shape my discussion accordingly. I am sure that the bench and the bar of the whole state will recognize their debt to Mr. Jessup for his labors in behalf of a more efficient judicial system, and also their debt to the committee of the Phi Delta Phi for the concrete and tangible form in which its recommendations are presented. In no respect will this conference of the Academy perform a greater public service than in thus placing emphasis, now and hereafter, upon the importance of concrete formulation of every suggestion which anyone has to make along the lines of constitutional change, to the end that the same may be thought out and fought out before the convention itself comes together in Albany next April. I hope that the Academy and its program committee will strongly recommend, if not absolutely insist, that I and every other speaker who utilizes this platform to urge any change in the existing constitution of the state, shall follow Mr. Jessup's example and annex to the printed version of his remarks, in at least some tentative form, "the black-and-white" of exactly what he proposes.

No length of experience on the bench or at the bar is available to give weight to anything I may say in discussion of the

'Discussion at the meeting of the Academy of Political Science, November 19,

1914.

details of Mr. Jessup's suggestions, but I come to you from a tribunal of which each member conducts probably more jury trials of civil cases each month and each year than does any justice of any other court in America, and I can at least indicate to you how some of these things appeal to me, from the viewpoint of that daily contact. It seems to me that Mr. Jessup's proposals, and the parallel proposals of the Phi Delta Phi and some of the bar associations, have the merit that they spring, not from preconceived abstractions or pre-disposition to change, but rather from the actualities, "the grass roots," of the hard, day-by-day experience of the bench and bar. Considered as a whole and with due allowance for some difference as to details, they represent only conservative and well-demonstrated changes in either the substance or the phraseology of the existing constitutional provisions; and it seems to me to be the first axiom of any revision of the judiciary article, that there should be no change in its well-litigated wording or its well-tried substantive provisions, except on the basis of what has been established by convincing experience and what offers reasonable certainty of improvement in that which we already have. You may or may not believe, as I do, that other and further changes in the judiciary article, over and above what Mr. Jessup has discussed, should and will receive careful consideration at the hands of the constitutional convention; but this I do not believe can be gainsaid, that if the convention should bring about no other thing than the writing into our fundamental law of substantially the provisions formulated by the Phi Delta Phi, the work of the convention would nevertheless be worth to the state a thousand times more than the convention will cost, and New York would be placed actually in the lead of all the states in the efficiency and suitableness of her machinery for the administration of justice. Improved in detail these recommendations can, and doubtless will be; but they represent an acceptable minimum of positive advance.

Doubtless you all were impressed by what Mr. Jessup said regarding the relative inefficiency of our judicial system as a mechanism for securing the results to which it is consecrated. I do not suppose that an alert business man or "business law

217

yer" ever comes from his well-organized, perfectly coördinated office into a court in this city without feeling somehow, consciously or unconsciously, that the court has failed to keep pace with the life of the community which surges outside its walls, and that somehow the organization, procedure, and administrative routine of the court are still of an era which the community outside has necessarily superseded, in order to hold its own in the commercial competition of the times. The tribunal to which, as a last resort, the business man submits his controversies with his fellows, is practically the only institution of private or public activity which, in its administrative and procedural methods, still lumbers on in the same old way of fifty years ago. Right here, I am inclined to believe, will be found the responsibility for a large part of that variance to which Mr. Jessup has referred, between justice as administered in a court and justice as innately conceived by the average man of intelligence and good conscience. I do not find men unwilling to have their disputes and controversies determined and their rights of property adjudicated according to the principles of our substantive law. It is not a desire to avoid the application of rules of law which drives business men out of our courts, into reluctant settlement of controversies which should. be litigated or into the submission of them to arbitration tribunals established by private agencies. Litigants do not submit themselves before arbitration committees of commercial organizations in order to secure the arbitrium boni viri or to subject. their property and rights to individual judgment as substitute for long-established rules of the substantive law. The aversion of the business man is to the procedural and administrative side of our legal machinery. He believes in and needs the administration of justice according to law; the safety of his transactions requires certainty and rule as the basis of individual and property rights. Popular dissatisfaction with the law, as I find it, is based not so much upon the variance between justice according to the substantive law and justice according to the arbitrium boni viri, as upon the variance between the justice which would result from a fair, prompt determination of controversies according to substantive legal