COURT OF APPEAL.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 26, 22 July 1871, Page 2

COURT OF APPEAL.

[lndependent, July 15.] We wonder what proportion of suitors gain anything by a lawsuit. After the costs are paid on both sides, how much on the average remains of the subject matter of the dispute? Is litigation worth the candle to those engaged in it I Even when the parties are not exacerbated by hostile feeling, they too often find the inscription over the gates of Dante's Hell that which they might inscribe on the door of the palace of justice—" Leave all hope behind you who enter here ;" or rather, " you will leave all cash behind, ye who depart from hence." " A friendly chancery suit," we once heard a friend exclaim, to whom such a proceeding was recommended—" a friendly cholera morbus !" ]S T o doubt, in a vast number of cases the result would be much the same! " You take my life when you do take that by which I live;" and, certainly, the pangs and gripes of the physical disease are not much less tolerable than those which rack the unfortunate victim of litigation, whether he succeed or whether he fail. So long, however, as mankind-are divided into the two great family branches of knaves and fools, and so long as business is conducted on the sharp practice principles which too generally regulate it, we shall have courts of law to settle the differences which will arise. And so long as the cost of the operation falls exclusively on the litigants, we outsiders have perhaps no right to complain. But as the establishments by which law is dispensed are kept up at the public cost, the tax-payer has a right to enquire whether he gets full value for his money, and whether he is not unduly burdened for somebody else's good. Our attention is called to the matter by the sitting of the Court of Appeal, which is at present being held in this city. We are extremely glad to see the right worshipful gentlemen who compose the Supreme Court sitting " like gods together" in horsehair and bombazeen, on the judicial bench of the Appeal Court. It is a sight which is calculated to impress the minds of all who behold it with feelings of reverence and awe, and it might contribute to the making of many law-abiding citizens, if our school children were taken to the court during its session, in order that their young minds might appreciate the solemnity and dignity of the exhibition. "We remember forming one of a number who were thus taught loyalty to the British constitution by. a visit to Madame Tussaud's waxworks, where we got into the august presence of the " counterfeit presentment" of King George the Third, and the virtuous Queen who shared his bed and throne, and were taught by the respectable Mentor, who paid our sixpence a head, to reverence ever after the divine institution of kingship. There is, however, this difference ; the waxy monarch and his female partner, were placed there only to collect sixpences, and awe the beholder. The judges of the Court of Appeal have other functions ; the principal of which is this, that when a number of ingenious lawyers have split hairs into the smallest possible fibres, the Court, with what Mr Wellcr calls " a double million magnifying glass" ascertains and decides whose split hair is the thickest; a result of which often is that the poor litigant who had got the best of it in the court below, gets the worst of it in the court above, and the verdict given by a jury of his countrymen under the guidance of a siugle judge is reversed by a lull bench of judges, without any jury at all. However, the lawyers like it, and it is to be presumed their clients do also ; we should therefore have no right to have any opinion on the fitness of things in this direction, were it not that we, who are neither lawyers nor clients, we the taxpayers, have to pay the cost of the sitting of the court. We are at liberty therefore to ask whether the court is worth the money it costs, and whether, if we must have a supreme tribunal of'appeal, we might not have one which would be less expensive to the public, and, we might add, less ruinous to the litigant. The great fault of the present Court, it appears to us, is that its judges are brought so far to do so little. Five judges, including their chief, are brought from the several judicial districts, hundreds of miles apart, to decide some dozen or (ewer cases, in many of which the point for decision is neither a very

weighty nor a very difficult one, and in many of which it is clear that the only reason for appealing was to give the lawyer of the party defeated below a chance of getting his costs by reversing the decision in the court above—the subject matter having long ago been dissolved by the process so scribed in the fable of the disputed oyster. No doubt now and then there are cases worthy of a Jovian nod, but they are few and far between, and there would be little hardship done if the community, as a rule, were compelled to abide the decision of the original trial, and not have the opportunity of prolonging litigation by carrying the case to a court of appeal. However, if they like, let them ; only don't make us taxpayers pay unnecessarily for a proceeding which, it seems to us, might be much more cheaply effected. For instance, suppose the defeated party below wishes to appeal. Instead of dragging the learned judges about the colony, subject to the actual horrors of sea travel and the possible horrors of shipwreck, while the work of their district is necessarily neglected, more or less, why not make the appellant state his grounds in writing, referring specially to the cases by which the judges must be guided; let the appeal be settled between the lawyers, as in a special case, subject to the concurrence of the Judge who tried the cause ; and then, being printed foi a few pounds or shillings, let a copy be sent to each Judge for his written judgment. Surely this ought to satisfy any reasonable man, and in all probability not in one case in 10,000 would any other decision bo arrived at than that which would have been given if the Court had sat as at present, and hundreds of pounds had been paid to dozens of lawyers to split millions of hairs.

Another fault of the Court which we have heard imputed by lawyers in other parts of the colony is, that sitting m it does, at one central place, it is impossible for lawyers not residing tt that place to leave their business for a long period and attend the sitting ofthe Court at Wellington. It is equally impossible, as a general rule, that they can trust their client's case to a,Wellington lawyer, who has not been preyipusly acquainted with it, and had practical experience in the Court below ofthe niceties on which it may turn. The proposal we have made, to proceed by way of printed documents/referred separately to each judge, would place all lawyers on one footing, and relieve the client from a very heavy amount of costs when at present the case is reargued at length in open Court.. Another saving which might be effected if the valuable time of the judges were not occupied by the sittings of the Appeal Court is, that they might undertake a large amount of work now delegated to District Court judges and wardens of gold-fields. Many thousands of pounds, we suspect, might be annually saved if the time now occupied in the Appeal Court were employed in the business of these inferior courts : while the character of the latter would be elevated by their being a branch of the Supreme Court, and presided over by judges of the highest stamp which the colony possesses. In conclusion, we may remark that one class of cases which is, of all, the most likely to give work for a Court of Appeal—those which relate to landed estate —will in New Zealand, we hope, give little scope for litigation hereafter. The intricacy and abtruseness of the law relating to that species of property hitherto, particularly in Great Britain, is happily got rid of by the Pieal Property Transfer Act; and the plentiful crop of appeal cases which might have been looked for in future years from this source, will, it is hoped, now have no existence. This is an additional reason for such an alteration as we propose.