Horace Binney's Pamphlets [pp. 641-647]

Horace Binney's Pamphlets.
pleasant reminiscences of Lewis, of Tilghman, and of Ingersoll.
It is well for lawyers of to-day to know the lawyers of the past,
and profit by their example in learning and in general accomplishments. The Bar, we are pained to believe, has deteriorated, and more painful still, is deteriorating. The training
with which law-students are now disciplined is but a sham, when
compared with the hard mental gymnastics by which the old
lawyers were invigorated and sharpened for the conflicts of the
forum. And the modern digests, both of reports and of statutes,
enable the lawyer in practice to cram himself for the occasion,
without disciplining his faculties, as searching through the reasonings of cases and collating of statutes did in earlier times.
Another cause of change in the character of lawyers is the
establishment of local courts, with their separate bars. Formerly there were courts of wide territorial original jurisdiction in
the States, which brought all the lawyers together at the same
bar for the trial of causes before the jury. The wider field for
forensic ambition and rivalry furnished in these courts, stimulated lawyers to greater exertion. It is said, that when the old
General Court of Maryland was established to give place to the
local courts, Pinckney, the greatest of Maryland lawyers, said,
"The glory of our bar is gone for ever!" Even the appellate
courts do not now call the lawyers of the several inferior courts
together. The increase of business in the appellate courts has
made it necessary to divide the docket into sections suited to
the convenience of each local court; so that the lawyers firom
the several courts do not now meet even in the appellate
courts. Any wide fraternity of the Bar is thus rendered impossible.
The attempted law-reforms, too, have tended to lower the
intellectual ability of the Bar. These pretended reforms have
abolished the technical common law pleading, and substituted a
loose and unscientific mode of statement, thereby begetting in
lawyers loose and illogical habits of mind. The guiding idea in
these reforms seem to be, that science is an obsolete thing, well
for the old fogies of the past, but behind the practical enlightenment of this age of progress. Maryland has been wiser than
her sister States in her law reforms. She simplified and ren dered more scientific the old common law pleading, thereby
1860.]
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