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But about the only concrete suggestion the A. B. A. had last week for improving that administration of justice was the creation of a Department of Justice within each State. Such a department would "direct and supervise actively the work of every district attorney, sheriff, and law enforcement agency," should possess rec ord systems, a scientific laboratory, competent investigators. Cold water was thrown on such a scheme, however, by a Wisconsin prosecutor who said his State had tried it twice and failed for lack of men and money.
Not one important criminal lawyer made himself sufficiently noteworthy at Milwaukee last week to stand up and de fend his branch of the profession. The majority of the 3,000 A. B. A. members at the convention were corporation law yers, more interested in the New Deal than in crime or morals. Apparently the New Deal had brought them a vast deal of new legal business. They were obviously prosperous and contented. They dressed nattily. They sported canes. They smoked 25 cigars. And when they spread them selves in the chairs of hotel lobbies, their hitched-up trouser-legs displayed the ultimate in masculine self-esteem—gaudy socks and garters.
Although New Deal business makes lawyers rich, New Deal law makes them bewildered. New rules and regulations are being issued too speedily for lawyers to understand and remember. Bitterly Louis Goldsborough Caldwell, who once was general counsel to the Federal Radio Commission and so helped to promulgate demi-judicial, demi-legislative orders him self, complained that he was obliged to give up trying to tabulate New Deal rules and regulations in a handbook. He begged for a Federal Administrative Court, with branches and divisions, to take over the judicial functions of administrative boards and commissions.
But to many a lawyer, like Judge Joseph Bradley David of Chicago, the idea of such a court sounded like blasphemy. Cried horror-stricken Judge David last week: "It is an affront to the President of the U. S. . . . An attempt to prevent the greatest humanitarian who has sat in the White House for 70 years in carrying out his work."
Some of Judge David's auditors clapped their hands. Many laughed. Continued the Judge: "I doubt whether the people respect the courts more than they do these bureaus."
Judge David has many compatriots in assuming President Roosevelt's transcendency. Yet there was no hero-worship, no malice, in what a great detached intelligence. Dean Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School, had to say in Milwaukee last week. Declared the man from whose school Franklin Roosevelt has drawn his best legal ideas, his smartest young legal-ites: "The present-day American President is a Tudor or Stuart king, ruling with his Parliament if he can, but without it if he must."
That is perfectly natural, Dean Pound reassured his audience. In the beginning Congress was the dominating force. Then Chief Justice John Marshall declared: "We must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding—a Constitution intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs." And the judicial branch of the Government rose in influence. Now it is the Administrative branch's turn. "A tribute." soothingly continued Dean Pound, "to our governmental system that these changes can take place without