LAW SOCIETY.

Taranaki Daily News, 31 August 1922, Page 5

LAW SOCIETY.

ADDRESS BY MR. JUSTICE CHAPMAN. At the request of the council of the Taranaki District Law Society, Mr. Justice Chapman found time, during a very heavy session of the Supreme Court, to give a most interesting and useful address to solicitors and law students last night. There was a large attendance in the Law Library. Mr. Justice Chapman spoke on “The Bibliography of the. Law Reports,” a subject which sounds, perhaps, jejune and dry to laymen, but to his audience His Honour’s address, given without notes for well over an hour, was extremely interesting. The present series of official Law Reports started in 1866. Prior to that date, the reporting in the various Courts was done by individual members of the Bar, and the best series of their scattered reports is now consolidated in the reprint entitled “The English Reports,” now continued in the Law Reports, and His Honour detailed the manner in which the English Reports deal with their subject matter. The speaker also gave an account of the various changes in the constitution and nomenclature of the Courts, and of the various systems of Reports in the United States, and of the various British Dominions, especially Australia, where his father, later a New Zealand Supreme Court Judge, was also once a Judge. At the conclusion of the address a hearty vote of thanks was proposed by one of the youngest recruits to the ranks of solicitors, seconded by the oldest practising solicitor in Taranaki, and this was followed by a pleasant supper, kindly arranged for and supplied by the president and some of the ladies of the Victoria League, where th tt lawyers were the guests of the president of the Law Sosiwy (Mr. C. M. sVastoa).