date

1823 Feb y. 28. Greece. J.B's Observations
1823 Feb y. 28.

Greece. J.B's Observations on particular Articles.

Judiciary resumed

But if there were a sort of man on whom a note of eminent untrustworthiness should be put for the instruction and guidance of a Jury, it should be the hireling advocate. When the man, impregnated to the very marrow with the practice of mendacity and the love of injustice, is raised to the Judicial Bench, an appropriate masquerade dress is put upon him, and the silly and deluded multitude behold in him justice personified. Oftener has the Black mare been rendered white by dipping, than the hireling advocate converted, by a seat on the Judicial Bench, into a lover of Justice. Every now and then in England, passes the following scene. Advocate or Judge to witness - Do you believe in the existence of a God? Witness to Judge - Yes - Judge, thereupon, to Advocate - Proceed with him, he is a good witness - Advocate or Judge to Witness - Do you believe in the existence of a God? - Witness - No: Judge - Out with him: his testimony is not receivable. Thus, then, if the Atheist will, to so indefensible a question, give a false answer, he is admitted: but, if his regard for truth be such that he will not give a false answer, he is held out as an object of reproach,- a man, to whose testimony no regard can safely be given, and, as such rejected. But to the man of habitual mendacity, any such man of conspicuously and painfully manifested veracity, is an object of the deepest hatred and vengeance; and, to gratify this malignant passion, he scruples not to make sacrifice of the injured party, whose misfortune it has been to have need of the testimony of this too veracious witness.
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    Description: 1823 Feb y. 28.

    Greece. J.B's Observations on particular Articles

    Judicial Procedure

    In Judicature, where there is no publicity, there is no justice: no tolerably adequate security for the giving due execution and effect to the laws, whatsoever they may be. That justice should have been the object where the doors of a Judicatory have been kept regularly closed, is not possible. The object of the arrangement has been, the sacrifice of the universal interest of all men in the character of justiciables, to the particular and sinister interest either of the Judge, or of the despot whose creature and Instrument he is, or both together. Judicature has for its only right and proper ends, these: main and positive end, giving execution and effect to the Laws, whatsoever they may be: collateral and negative ends, avoidance of all needless delay, expence, and vexation in other shapes: all needless delay is injustice while it lasts.

    Judiciary resumed

    The class of persons in which it is desirable that Judges be chosen, is that of Judge-deputes, as above - viz. such by which, in the discharge of that function, the highest degree of appropriate aptitude, in its several branches, has been manifested: the class of persons in which it is desirable that Judges should not be chosen, is that of hireling advocates. In the breast of the hireling advocate, the chance of inaptitude, in that shape in which it is opposed to appropriate moral aptitude, is at its maximum: it amounts to a moral certainty. He lets himself out to hire indiscriminately to the party injured, or the injurer, to the guiltless man unjustly accused, or the malefactor, according as he happens to be retained: but it is uniformly on the side of the party in the wrong, that his predilection ranges itself. In the party who, being in the wrong, is conscious of his being so, he looks for his best Customer; and, in case of success: the more flagrantly his client is in the wrong, the more illustrious the triumph of his advocate: the more conspicuous the proof afforded of the union of appropriate active, with appropriate intellectual aptitude, with reference to the function of defeating the ends of Justice. Whatsoever falshood or insincerity in any other shape the advocate has occasion to defile himself with, the deluded public suffers him to scrape off from his own shoulders, and lay upon those of his client: his whole life is thereby a life of falshood and insincerity. Exclusions applied to the faculty of giving testimony, on the ground of moral inaptitude, are, if ever sincerely intended, a very foolishly devised instrument for avoidance of mendacity and thence of deception and injustice.

    But
  • Title: [1823. Feb y. 28. Greece. J.B's Observations]
    Description: 1823. Feb y. 28.

    Greece. J.B's Observations on particular Articles

    Judiciary resumed

    In a country in which a sort of imaginary law, called unwritten, and which has so much more writing belonging to it than that which is called written, has place, the choice made of Judges from the order of Advocates, has an unhappily existing reason, adequate or inadequate, as well as a pretence. There being no rule of action really in existence, the hireling advocate is the only sort of man who can be regarded as an adept in the art of speaking of the case, whatever it be, in a manner that supposes the existence of a rule of action, and in the use of that jargon which has been employed in palming upon the public that fiction in the character of a truth. To him alone is sufficiently familiar that branch of the thieve's cant. The care of keeping on foot this disastrous reason, this unhappy necessity, is one cause of the care taken by the fraternity of Lawyers to keep the rule of action from ever receiving real existence. By the impossibility of defending himself, by his own powers, against those injuries which the fraternity are in league to inflict on him, a man is thus under the deplorable necessity of purchasing, at the ruinous price set upon it, their essentially treacherous assistance. Bonaparte being a Despot, was, by the vigor of his mind, enabled to add to his vulgar triumphs, too transcendental ones: triumphs over the two bitterest and most mischievous enemies of the human race - established priests and lawyers. Over the lawyer tribe, the main cause and token of his triumph was the establishment of a really-existing body of law, having for its object not indeed the greatest happiness - not of the greatest number, but of the one, Napoleon Bonaparte: it sacrificed, wheresoever competition appeared to show itself, the interest of all, to the interest of that one. But, had it been several times worse than it is, France would still have beheld and felt in it a matchless benefit. The Citizens of the Anglo-American United States have thrown off the yoke of a Monarchy, have thrown off the yoke of an Aristocracy, have many of them, thrown off the yoke of an established priesthood. But the yoke of the hireling advocate still presses upon their necks: their courage has been sufficient to free them from the yoke of the English Monarch: but their wisdom has not yet been sufficient to liberate them from the yoke imposed upon them by the most corrupt and profligate of his tools.

    Oh weakness!
  • Title: [1823. Feb y. 28. Greece. J.B's Observations]
    Description: 1823. Feb y. 28.

    Greece. J.B's Observations on particular Articles.

    Judicial Procedure

    Judicial Procedure.

    Proper and only proper model of Judicial procedure, the domestic. For, in domestic procedure, there are no hireling advocates interested in the obstruction and defeat of the ends of justice. For the collection of evidence, powers which are not to be found in the domestic Judicatory, will in many instances be necessary to the public Judicatory. These powers must of course be supplied. But in point of need, in this supply lies almost the only difference requisite. In domestic procedure, the only natural procedure has its model. In every father, his children and his other servants, if he has any, behold their Judge. Contradistinguished in it's name, because opposite as to the ends to which the course of it has been directed, must be the course of procedure by far the most extensively as yet in use: call it the technical - such is the name by which, even by it's inventors, it has been characterized. For technical, say on any occasion unjust - you need not fear misnaming it.