Search

These constitutional declarations do not enforce themselves. The litigant who seeks justice must surmount certain obstacles among the most important of which are court costs, delay of court procedure and the expense of a lawyer to conduct the case through the intricacies of legal procedure. Let us example a specific problem of the poor man with a just claim in his efforts to secure justice. Two years ago a letter was brought to the Philadelphia Legal Aid Bureau, written with reference to a blind woman. This woman was entitled to the rent of a building as long as she lived. Besides this, she made a dollar or two a week at odd jobs in her home. The building was in the possession of an agent who collected the rents and after deducting a commission and expenses, paid the balance to the old woman. The rent was $18.00 a month and the old woman received $12.00 a month to live on. The agent had notified her that the rent was to be reduced and that brought her appeal for help. Upon investigation it was found that the property should have brought $60.00 a month rent and that the agent was a friend of the tenant and was deliberately taking advantage of the old woman's helpless condition to aid his friend. The old woman was about to call upon a charitable association for aid.

subject, when first assigned to the author as a part of a symposium, seemed one of doubtful definition. The author has assumed that it means recording data in such form as may be readily available and easily proven in actions instituted to establish water rights or resist their invasion. From that point of view the subject is of importance. Legal proceedings put in motion for the determination of water rights may be and usually are unduly prolonged under present methods of court procedure and, as a consequence, are costly. The chief cause of this situation is the condition of departmental records. Data which in the ordinary affairs of life are accepted and relied upon are, when produced in court, subjected to microscopical scrutiny, and the slightest error in addition, subtraction or multiplication, even to a hundredth of a foot, is seized upon as an indication of the unreliability of the observer or computer. So common is this the case that the method pursued in the trial of water cases has become little less than scandalous. Dreary hours of cross-examination of minor officials stretch into weeks and months until the superintendents or engineers of water works systems become provoked. They see comfortable balances over expenditures disappearing in the form of court costs, lawyers' fees and compensation of experts, the result of which does not increase the supply of water or return additional profits. They are justified in their chagrin. Yet they are chiefly responsible for the condition that they deplore. The author assumes that when an engineer undertakes to develop a water works system, he investigates the product of the source, the cost of a distributing system, computes the capital outlay required, the interest thereon, the cost of operation, maintenance and re

A review of the practice in recovering court expenditures [raskhody] in civil cases and court costs [izderzhki] in criminal cases has demonstrated that courts do not always observe the laws in effect with regard to this matter, that they commit significant errors. Frequently, in accepting the filing of suits and appeals in civil cases, courts do not exact payment of the state fee provided by law, or else they determine it inaccurately. They do not always take into consideration the fact that expenditures caused the court in connection with the trial and the state fee, from which a plaintiff has been exempted, are to be recovered from the respondent for the state in proportion to the satisfied portion of the claim in the suit. In violation of Article 45 of the RSFSR Code of Civil Procedure and the corresponding articles of the civil procedural codes of the other union republics, many courts do not demand that the parties make advance payment of the sums needed to meet the costs of calling witnesses and exp...

To the Editor.— Many maintain that the contingent fee is the major factor in promoting malpractice suits under our present state laws as it favors an unscrupulous plaintiff over an innocent defendant. An innocent successful defendant in a malpractice suit still has to pay his own attorney's fee. Isn't this legalized extortion, when you are innocent and proved innocent by the court? We must change our state laws so that they will require the plaintiff, if he loses his case in the court, to not only pay court costs but also a reasonable fee to the winning party's attorney. Such a proposed change in our state laws, on the other hand, would also be beneficial to a plaintiff who had a just reason for a malpractice suit, for in his successful court action the guilty defendant would not only pay court costs but also the attorney's fee of the plaintiff.