The judiciary power of Rhode Island is vested in a supreme court, consisting of a chief and two associate justices; and a court of common pleas (composed of five judges) for each of the five counties. _All the judges are appointed annually by the legislature_. This feature alone suffices to stamp the whole system with insignificance: for what skill in jurisprudence--what independence of popular excitements and party influences--could be expected from judges whom the breath of a party leader can make and unmake, at each year's end? When to this we add, that the chief justice of the supreme court receives a salary of $650, and each associate $550, we need not wonder that no decision of the Rhode Island bench is ever quoted in other states. The governor's salary is $400; the lieutenant governor's, $200. But if, in scantiness of territory and a corresponding scantiness of means, this state is ordained by nature to be the San Marino of America, yet it is purely her own fault if, by the precarious tenure of her judicial offices, she reduces one of the most important departments of _mind_ to the same diminutive scale, and goes far to make herself morally and intellectually also, the insignificant miniature of a commonwealth. In Connecticut, justice is administered in causes of small amount by county courts, whose judges are chosen annually: and in larger causes, by superior courts. The latter are held semi-annually in each county by one of five judges, who also form the supreme court. They hold office during good behavior, or until seventy years of age: and have both law and chancery jurisdiction. The supreme court sits once a year _in each county_. I do not know what actual loss of valuable services Connecticut has suffered, by her rule which drives judges from the bench just at the juncture when their faculties are in many instances the most happily ripe for its functions: but, that she has lost and will lose, no one can doubt who remembers, that thirteen of the best years of Mansfield's judicial life, and fourteen or fifteen of Wythe's and Pendleton's, were after the age of seventy; and that such a rule would have deprived the United States' judiciary, ten years ago, of its present gigantic Coryphæus--confessedly one of the purest and most powerful minds that ever filled any judgment seat. But what heightened or adequate terms of censure can be found for the New York rule, which displaces every judge at sixty? A rule which prematurely discarded Spencer and Lansing; and which, for more than ten years, has made Kent employ the full vigor and maturity of his intellect in writing abstract treatises, and selling _chamber_ opinions, instead of going on as he had begun, to build up for his state a system of jurisprudence hardly inferior to that which Mansfield reared for England?