JUSTICE," said Daniel Webster, "is the great interest of man on earth." But the focus of interest shifts. In Webster's day it centered on the courts; trials were closely watched, judges were appraised, lawyers had their bands of knowing followers. The present interest in justice is spotty. It concentrates on the detection of criminals, on new statutes, and on the public-welfare services encompassed by the phrase "social justice." The courts are so neglected by the educators, the press and the public that reporters covering a rare sensation, such as the Sheppard trial, find that they have to pause for parenthetical explanation of the simplest procedures and the oldest rules of evidence. But no government will ever be much better than its courts. No system of welfare services, no multiplication of statutes or policemen can ever substitute for the ancient function in which society reflects dhe cosmic order, however dimly, by the dispensation of justice between man and man.
While the public's back has been turned, a handful of lawyers and laymen have been trying to improve the courts of the U.S. A leader in this fight is Chief Justice Arthur T. Vanderbilt of the New Jersey Supreme Court, a distinguished jurist and the head of a state court system that has risen from one of the nation's worst to one of the best in ten years. Judge Vanderbilt notes that although some jurisdictions have made great improvements in the last two decades, in others the judges are substandard, procedures are unnecessarily complex, and court administration is inefficient. In a brilliant series of lectures at the University of Virginia, to be published in book form later this year, Judge Vanderbilt says: "It is in the courts and not in the legislature that our citizens primarily feel the keen, cutting edge of the law. If they have respect for the work of the courts as it affects them, their respect for law will survive the shortcomings of every other branch of government; but if they lose their respect for the work of the courts, their respect for law and order will vanish with it, to the great detriment of society."
To achieve and maintain this respect, Vanderbilt urges action on three fronts:
1) Improving the quality of judges.
2) Simplifying court procedures.
3) Cutting delay by better management.
THE MEN OF THE COURTS The history of the English constitution is largely one of struggle toward an independent, qualified judiciary (in the Magna Carta, King John covenanted that "we will appoint as justices . . . only such as know the law of the realm and mean to observe it well"). The men who shaped the governments of the U.S. and its states were acutely conscious of the importance of a judiciary free to act without fear or favor toward the executive and legislative branches. In the post-revolutionary period nearly all judges—state as well as federal—were named by appointment and got life tenure "during good behavior."