FORMS AND RULES

Hokitika Guardian, 5 April 1929, Page 7

FORMS AND RULES

ORIGIN IN RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES.

Speaking at tip. law conference today, Sir John Findlay, K.C.. stated that the code of etiquette of the legal profession had been adopted as a means of protecting the dignity of flic profession and preventing injury to its members. Among Ihe ancient Celts, tin* Romans and the Creeks they found tin* first begin nigs of the legal profession in the* sacred calling of the priesthood. The lawyers of England had the same origin. That was the true origin of that almost superstitious regard for forms, that implict faith in texts, tbal strict observance of rigid rules wliieli bad been so often .satirised. Tn a lawyer’s earliest legal transactions were religious ceremonies. Tlio making of a will, tbe taking of a wife the buying of a piece of land and oven tlio sak' of a horse, were effected by sacerdotal forms and rites.

To tlio ancient priesthood, .as index'd to many modorn priests, form was a fetish and a tyrant hut from its thraldom tlio legal profession had steadily separated itself, and what remained now of that early subjection was duo to the admitted influences of its early origin. The ceremony of the sale of a horse was not in our day marked by any religious feature and if a man desired it he might get a title to a wife even, to-day with less expense and form than the title to a cabbage garden, but the definite separation of law from theology had not been effected until after the Middle Ages. The whole trend of modern law had been to diminish to vanishing point the refpiisities of form an ceremony. What remained in our legal system in the shape of procedure and formality could nearly all be justified either upon rational grounds or upon the ’ground of public good and public individual protection. Legal “etiquette” in its widest significance was a much higher and great er thing than the polite manners of the profession. Jt included all those honourable rules and obligations, practices and proceedings, which whilst themselves not enforcable as law, were nevertheless, most effective machinery by which our "legal system might he made smoothly operative and substantialLv effective.