Magna Carta, and Other AddressesGuthrie, William D. (William Dameron)
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Magna Carta, and Other Addresses
Guthrie, William D. (William Dameron)
Constitutional law -- United States
Let us turn to the picture drawn by Mr. Roosevelt in describing this
case for the instruction and guidance of a constitutional convention.
"I am not thinking of the terminology of the decision, nor of what seem
to me the hair-splitting and meticulous arguments elaborately worked
out to justify a great and terrible miscarriage of justice. Moreover,
I am not thinking only of the sufferers in any given case, but of the
tens of thousands of others who suffer because of the way this case was
decided. In the New York case, the railway employee who was injured
was a man named, I believe, Ives. The court admits that by every moral
consideration he was entitled to recover as his due the money that the
law intended to give him. Yet the court by its decision forces that
man to stagger through life maimed, and keeps the money that should be
his in the treasury of the company in whose service, as an incident of
his regular employment and in the endurance of ordinary risks, he lost
the ability to earn his own livelihood. There are thousands of Iveses
in this country; thousands of cases such as this come up every year;
and while this is true, while the courts deny essential and elementary
justice to these men and give to them and the people in exchange for
justice a technical and empty formula, it is idle to ask me not to
criticize them. As long as injustice is kept thus intrenched by any
court, I will protest as strongly as in me lies against such action."
To repeat, as a matter of fact, Ives was not maimed; he was not
permanently injured; he was not deprived of the ability to earn his
livelihood. Nor did the Court of Appeals admit that by every moral
consideration Ives was entitled to recover as his due the money that
the law intended to give him. Had that point been before a court of
justice, however sympathetic and sentimental, I doubt very much whether
it could have held that Ives was entitled, by any moral consideration
whatever, to compel the railway company to compensate him for the
four or five weeks' loss of wages resulting from no fault on its
part but from his own carelessness. The statements that "the court
by its decision forces that man to stagger through life maimed" and
that "he lost the ability to earn his own livelihood" were simply so
much fiction, but, of course they were very effective with emotional
audiences and highly calculated to inflame Mr. Roosevelt's hearers
and readers against the courts. I venture to assert that it would be
difficult to find or indeed to conceive a more unwarranted and unfair
misrepresentation of the facts actually before a court.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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