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[Illustration: THE CORRIDORS OF THE COURTS]




  A PHILADELPHIA LAWYER
  IN THE LONDON COURTS

  BY

  THOMAS LEAMING


  _Illustrated by the Author_


  SECOND EDITION, REVISED


  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
  1912




  COPYRIGHT, 1911,
  BY
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY


  Published May, 1911




PREFACE


The nucleus of this volume was an address delivered before the
Pennsylvania State Bar Association which, finding its way into
various newspapers in the United States and England, received a
degree of favorable notice that seemed to warrant further pursuit of
a subject heretofore apparently overlooked. Successive holiday
visits to England were utilized for this purpose.

As our institutions are largely derived from England, it is natural
that the discussion of public questions and the glimpses of
important trials afforded by the daily papers--usually murder trials
or divorce cases--should more or less familiarize Americans with the
English point of view in legal matters. American lawyers, indeed,
must keep themselves in close touch with the actual decisions which
are collected in the reports to be found in every library and which
are frequently cited in our courts.

Nothing in print is available, however, from which much can be
learned concerning the barristers, the judges, or the solicitors,
themselves, whose labors establish these precedents. They seem to
have escaped the anthropologist, so curious about most vertebrates,
and they must be studied in their habitat--the Inns of Court, the
musty chambers and the courts themselves.

The more these almost unknown creatures are investigated, the more
will the pioneer appreciate the difficulty of penetrating the highly
specialized professional life of England, of mastering the many
peculiar customs and the elaborate etiquette by which it is governed
and of reproducing the atmosphere of it all. He will find that he
can do little but record his observations.

It was not unknown to him that some lawyers in England are called
barristers, some solicitors, and he had a vague impression that the
former, only, are advocates, whose functions and activities differ
from those of the solicitor; but he was hardly conscious that the
two callings are as unlike as those of a physician and an
apothecary. It requires personal observation to see that the
barristers, belonging to a limited and somewhat aristocratic corps,
less than 800 of whom monopolize the litigation of the entire
Kingdom, have little in common with the solicitors, scattered all
over England. The former are grouped together in their chambers in
the Inns, their clients are solicitors only, they have no contact,
perhaps not even an acquaintance, with the actual litigants and a
cause to them is like an abstract proposition to be scientifically
presented. The solicitors, on the other hand, constitute the men of
law-business, whose clients are the public, but who can not
themselves appear as advocates and must retain the barristers for
that purpose.

Again, it is difficult to grasp fully the influence exercised
through life by the barrister's Inn--that curious institution, with
its five hundred years of tradition--voluntarily joined by him when
a youth; where he has received his training; by which he has been
called to the Bar and may be disbarred for cause, and upon the
Benchers of which Inn he must naturally look as his exemplars,
although the Lord Chancellor may be the nominal creator of King's
Counsel and the donor of judge-ships. The impulse of these Inns is
still felt at the American Bar, despite more than a century's
separation, for, about the time of the Revolution, over a hundred
American law students were in attendance, not only acquiring, for
use in the new country, a sound legal training, but