The medical profession serves by administering the laws of health. If a fee is obtainable, that is incidental. If a fee is not forthcoming from the patient on account of his poverty, then the patient may go to a free clinic and there receive service and administration of the laws of health in the same expert way and from the same expert hands as if he were able to pay. The physician regards this work in free clinics as a part of his professional duty.

Our profession also renders service. That service is the administration of the law which the legislatures and courts have made. We pride ourselves that we are administering justice. If a client can pay a fee there are few lawyers who will refuse to accept it. But when a client comes to us with a just case, though without a fee, there are few who would refuse to see that he obtains justice. This we regard as part of our public duty.

In its simplest form legal aid work is nothing more than thissupplying a lawyer to a poor man who cannot afford to pay for the services and who, if he did not receive this assistance, might be denied justice.

As long as we receive justice we have no ground for objection. Where, however, the machinery for administering justice fails for any reason to operate or where there is a gap in that machinery, we, or some of us, may be placed in a most distressing position. For the poor man among us the legal machinery may fail to function properly for three reasons,-the first of these is the court costs which a man must pay before he gets into court at all. If he cannot pay these costs he may well be shut outside the law and thus denied justice. The second reason is the delay of court procedure. If the poor man needs his money at once for food and clothing it may very well be a practical denial of justice to compel him to wait for a week, a month or a year before he receives what the law says he is entitled to. The third difficulty with the administration of justice is the need for and the expense of a lawyer. If he cannot pay for a lawyer the machinery will not move and he may be denied justice. We are told by Charles Warren in his History of the American Bar that efforts were made in the early days to abolish the legal profession and require all men to plead their own cases in person. The experiment never succeeded because with the development of our law and procedure it has been found uinversally necessary to have a trained profession to handle this sort of work. Therefore, if the poor man

cannot afford to pay for a lawyer he is placed at a distinct disadvantage, particularly if his adversary has a lawyer.

Now let me illustrate the situation by a case which I personally handled a little over a year ago when I was chief counsel for the Philadelphia Legal Aid Bureau. There was a shortage of dwelling houses throughout the entire city. Many landlords said to their tenants, "Buy or get out". And many tenants, in spite of their poverty, were compelled to make efforts to buy. One man and his wife took everything in the world that they could spare except their clothing and pledged it with the pawnbroker for a loan of some $300, which they used to make a deposit toward the purchase of their house. They received in exchange an agreement calling for settlement within ninety days. The man at best made only a small salary and in addition to his wife there were some four children who had to be supported. During the ninety days he lost his position and was penniless. At the end of the ninety days the real estate man neglected to make an effort to settle or to convey the property. Another three months dragged on during which time the tenant went every day to see the real estate man as to when their settlement would be made. The real estate man never made an effort to settle. At last the tenant had no more money with which to complete the settlement and then the real estate man informed the tenant that owing to the tenant's failure to make settlement within the ninety days the agreement was void and the $300 deposit money was forfeited. This placed the tenant in a position where he owed the pawnbroker $300, and where the real estate man had the $300 and would not give it up.

Owing to threats by the real estate man the tenant and the family vacated the premises in mid-winter, and spent two nights in the police station, having no other place to go. Then they sought the services of the Philadelphia Legal Aid Bureau.

Our fundamental laws declare that in a situation of this sort the party injured has a right to a remedy and that the real estate man had no justification for his action. This is the theoretical situation. As a practical matter the real estate man had the $300, and the tenant was sleeping in the police station with his family and all the time the loan at the pawnbroker's was assuming more menacing proportions. In theory, at least, the tenant was entitled to all the rights and guarantees of our constitutional form of government. As a practical matter he was deprived of his rights and unable to assert them.

The laws which made these guarantees for his protection remained as they were before-shut up in books. There was no practical method of setting in operation the machinery of the law. For practical purposes he was denied justice.

This case illustrates the three conditions in which, under certain circumstances, the machinery of the law may stop.

In the first place, in a case of this sort, the tenant could have done nothing without the services of a lawyer. He was afraid to consult a lawyer because he thought that by so doing he would incur additional expense and he knew he could never afford to pay for such services. If he had gone to a lawyer the lawyer would have told him that to assert his rights in court would require at least $6, for court costs, and he had no money for court costs. He would have been informed that after he got into court it might take a week, a month or a year before the case would be decided and the rights of the parties adjusted. In the meantime the man would have to wait, and for him waiting meant a greatly increased debt to the pawnbroker and no adequate shelter for his family and himself. If a lawyer had handled such a case he would have been entitled to a very substantial fee for his services. The tenant never could afford to pay such charges. Therefore, from a practical point of view, because of court costs and delay and expense of counsel, he was denied his rights.

John M. Maguire of the Boston Bar has recently published a searching study entitled "Poverty and Civil Litigation". A digest of this article appeared in a recent number of the Michigan Bar Journal. This report deals with the efforts made by the Anglo-Saxon race to provide a method by which, in a suitable case, court costs might be waived in the interests of a poor litigant who would otherwise be denied justice. It is obvious that if court costs may thus be waived on suitable occasions they will cease to be a barrier to justice.

Many of our states have more or less effective statutes covering this point. Every state should see that its statutes in this regard are up to date and in good working order.

The problem of delay is as old as the law or nearly so. The wealthy litigant can afford to let his money remain in litigation for a period of time. The poor man nearly always needs his money for present expenses, for food and rent and clothing. If he does not receive it when he needs it he might as well not receive it at all.

The best remedy thus far suggested is the specialized court which has a machinery adapted to a particular type of case and which, in consequence, can dispose of a greater amount of work in a given space of time than a court in which various types of cases are adjudicated.

Examples of specialized courts are the Philadelphia Municipal Court, the Cleveland Small Claims Court, and the Conciliation Court which originated in Denmark and which has been copied in North Dakota recently and in Iowa and Minneapolis.

The report of the Committee on Legal Aid of the American Bar Association for 1923 comments on the small claims courts in the following words:

"The principle of the small claims court is firmly established. Such courts now exist in California, Idaho, Kansas, Massachusetts, in Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Spokane and St. Paul. They are enormously popular. Press comment is invariably favorable. The judges, while cognizant of details that may be improved, have welcomed this new type of court with its simple procedure. As one of the veteran judges of Massachusetts said on retiring from the bench "The small claims court is one of the most valuable institutions we have'."

The time is ripe for Michigan to adopt this form of court and to see that there is a more efficient machinery to handle the smaller

cases.

In your state constitution for 1908 there appears in Article XVI, Section 7 the following statement:

"The legislature may establish courts of conciliation with such powers and duties as shall be prescribed by law”.

Here is an opportunity to let conciliation do its part in expediting the settlement of small cases in Michigan. The constitution says that this is possible. In view of the conditions in most of our great cities in the United States this permission should no longer remain unfulfilled. There is almost a mandate that the legislature create such a court as an addition to our legal machinery.

Remedies such as these will eventually do away with many of the problems which come from court costs and delay. But a litigant needs an advocate and the history of the Anglo-Saxon race fails to show an adequate substitute for the trained lawyer. Once we admit

the need of a profession such as ours, we are faced with the problem of what course to pursue in a case where one party to a cause appears with a lawyer, while the other cannot afford the expense of counsel. It seems reasonable to suppose that in such case the man with the lawyer will win.

Therefore, if we admit (as we must do) that the legal profession is necessary to handle our legal procedure, we must also admit that complete justice is not always done if one party, because of his financial resources, is able to appear in court with a lawyer; while the other party to the same case, having, at least potentially a just case, is obliged, because of his poverty, to prepare his own legal papers, collect his own witnesses and conduct his own case. If the poor man cannot obtain the services of a lawyer he may well be denied justice. If he cannot pay for a lawyer, then, if we wish to do justice, one must be supplied for him without cost.

This, as I have said, is the fundamental purpose of the legal aid organization-supplying a lawyer for a poor man in an emergency

like this.

The next matter for consideration is to determine upon whose shoulders should fall the responsibility for this work. This involves a discussion of fundamentals.

Justice has been defined as the greatest aim of man on earth. In order to secure justice men have set up machinery which we call government. In a sense a government is successful or not depending upon the justice it secures for the governed. In a sense the whole duty of government is to secure justice for the people.

Our government is founded upon certain written documents, the constitution of the United States and the constitutions of the various states. These constitutions set forth the justice to be attained by our type of government and the machinery for securing it.

There are several fundamental ideas in these constitutions which give us the outline of justice. One of these is that we are guaranteed a government of laws and not of men; that our government shall be set upon clearly thought out, well devised rules, rather than upon the whim of an individual.

We are promised equal protection of the law-that before the law all men are equal; that no man because of the class in the community to which he belongs shall be above the law or below it.