LOL!! You keep drowning in your own bile!! ;-)
HIS RESPECT FOR THE LAW
Though by choice a lawyer and in practice an eminently successful one, he did not seem, in later life, at least, to have retained his early ardor for the profession. For the law itself he never lost respect and reverence. To him it was the bulwark of Justice, the safeguard of Liberty, and he gloried in its history and achievements. But for the perversions of the law he felt only contempt and indignation. He hated all dishonest and degenerate methods in its practice. The law, he held, should be invoked only in the interest of truth and justice, but was too often made the tool of injustice, oppression and wrong. He scorned to resort to the sophistries and subterfuges employed by many in the profession. He did not care to win a case merely for the fee involved or for the glory of winning it. He wanted the Right to triumph and could rejoice only when Victory perched on the heights of Truth.
Again, he chafed under the fetters and limitations of the modern practice. He believed that justice was often entangled in the net of technicalities. He could not endure the mechanical reliance on books, the cast-iron molds, the cut and dried forms, canned and labeled processes, papers and preparations ready-made for every case and all occasions. Most of these so-called helps he considered hindrances that crippled the law and made it limp and halt where it ought to leap and run. "The law's delay" he said, "is more often the lawyer's delay and should not be tolerated." Modern methods he believed consumed time, stifled originality, repressed individual initiative and tended to make of the law a mere puppet, an echo of old opinions, rulings and decisions, a slave to precedent. He hated the shackles of precedent. He hated all shackles. He wanted to be free to decide for himself in the law no less than in religion and in all other realms of thought and action. He was original, creative, independent. He examined rulings of courts but did not necessarily follow them. He has said to me, "One Judge contradicts another and between them I make my own decisions. If the law is not my way in this contention, it ought to be," and on this line he fought and won many a legal battle. |
