Courts -- United States; Trial practice -- United States
The Determination and Result departments at first were thought to be
of primary importance. Corresponding as they did in their functions to
the former exclusively judicial qualities of the courts and the final
judgments thereof, the exaggerated import previously given to those
functions pre-supposed an equal necessity in this subdivision of the
management of the corporation. This proved to be incorrect. It was
found that after a careful framing and narrowing of the matter in
dispute by the Issues department, and a thorough and careful sifting
of facts by the Expert and Investigation departments, the dispute
gradually, if not wholly, disappeared. Men of the highest character
and calibre being employed at large salaries as heads of these
departments, have given adequate satisfaction, as has been proved by
the prosperity of the Corporations. The recompense of the heads of
these various departments, requiring as it does men of the greatest
commercial understanding, is said to be in some instances fabulous.
In the early quarter of the present century and indeed in the latter
part of the nineteenth, the undercurrents of many movements were
already stirring the surface of the placid stream in which for so many
centuries had been flowing the course of justice. Those curious relics
of a medieval, age, the law courts, still at so recent a date,
retained many of the forms, characteristics, and usages of a time
when knights fought in plate armor and indulged in the mimicry of
battle, urged on by the glamor of chivalry. The very terms and the
legal phraseology of the period implied the jousts, tournaments, and
ordeal by battle of a romantic and self-deceptive age.
The universal world war that resulted in such an immense change of
social and economic values contributed naturally to the destruction
and abandonment of old forms and structures. Yet even before the war
and the economic revolution that followed so quickly thereafter, the
tendencies toward a more sane treatment of the question had already
begun.
Like the extinct class of so-called physicians and doctors, who have
now been amalgamated by the Public and Private Health Corporations,
what was known as the legal profession or men known as lawyers and
judges, had been gradually losing their characteristics as a class and
had been step by step merging into men of business.
One of the earliest changes was the disappearance of the lawyers known
as the real estate lawyer. Up to about 1890 there still remained
members of the legal profession who made a livelihood out of the
examination of the titles to real property. The obvious advantages of
a comprehensive title examination plant by large corporations known as
Title Insurance companies soon eliminated this particular subdivision.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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