JB_092_067.xml

Title: [7 Dec r 1807 Scotch Reform 11]

Description: 7 Dec r 1807

Scotch Reform 11

6

Letter V

Litigation promoted

§.2. General Directions

5. Between the production of wrongs, and the production of suits the connection being thus intimate, and in a practical view inseparably connected, it will scarcely be worth your while to trouble yourself with the distinction. In regard to articles of this sort the course you have to take is the plain straight forward one: which is to give them whatsoever encouragement is in your power, with no other attention than that of giving the preference to the sort called civil ones. Multiplying wrongs, you increase the quantity of the seed: multiplying suits, so they be of the productive sort, you increase the harvest.

6. Thus Your system of management has two main branches:

1. the manufacture of wrongs and suits: 2. turning to the best account each suit so made.

7. With a view to both branches, as being applicable to both branches, one general instruction may be of use to you: which is - never lose sight of the ends of justice. These ends cannot in the avoidance, prevention or cure of so many opposite and corresponding evils: and in particular the evils of factitious delay, vexation and expence in which latter your own profit is excluded. Between these evils so intimate is the connection, that there is scarce one of them that you can produce, without producing, if not a certainty, a chance not to be despised, of that which in the shape of profit comes into your pocket: so that in this case, without troubling your head with niceties, the plain and straight forward rule for you to pursue is - to lose no convenient opportunity of giving rise or increase to any of these evils.

091-077.xml

Title: [Dec r 1806 4 Resolution 5]

Description: Dec r 1806

4

Resolution 5

Pleading

As to the drift of this Resolution, so far as I can hope to reach it by conjecture, what it aims at /expresses/, or rather the [...?] it hints at, is, by way of a preference[?] to English Juries, the introduction of English Pleading. If so, I fear or rather I hope, it stands [...?] to remain for som etime longer in the limbos of infant and abortive projects.

Was not this the aim, (which however to a certainty it could not have been on the original enactment in 1787) to what end [...?] to force a defendant into a distinct admittance or denial of the plaintiffs alledged facts. Whatever is not denied may it not safely be taken for confession? Is not this the conclusion drawn naturally and of course? does it require an express regulation to authorise and require the drawing of it?

130_034.xml

Title: [30 Dec r 1809 Parl y. Reform]

Description: 30 Dec r 1809

Parl y. Reform

Ch. [...?]

Abbot

4

4

Secrecy[?] without apprenticeship

When confederating, when conspiracy, when plotting, as it might so legally be termed, to deliver the country from the tyranny of the Stuarts, Lord Russel, Lord Essex, Algernon Sydney did they not seek to "cover the nature of their transactions? But by this [...?] of their[?] did they either degrade or debase their characters? +

When by working at that sort of work of which the neighbourhood is most in want, and to which his skill and dexterity /natural faculties/ are best adapted, a man contravenes and violates the insecure[?] law, by which industry /labour/ when thus employed in the most beneficial manner was some 250 years ago converted into a crime does a man either degrade or debase his character? No: yet if he would save himself from the oppression of the [...?], whose industry /diligence/ /anxiety/ employs itself in spying out and punishing the skill which for the rivalling /equalling/ of which he wants either talent or industry to rival /are wanting to him/, must he not "cover the nature of his transactions?" - Yes he must keep under concealment if not the act of working, at any rate the non-existence of that ceremony /contract/ the existence of which has been rendered by that most foolish and oppressive law /of all laws/ necessary to save superior industry from being punished as a crime.

[Marginal note:] 1 Quaere whether to insert[?] J.B's offence against libel law? Suppose not, as not being conceald.