About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

287 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. vii (1953)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0287 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD THE Common Man of our title has little glamor because he is thoroughly anony- mous. His condition is not much improved when he masquerades, as he some- times does in these pages, under the somewhat more rakish name of the man in the street. It must be confessed, too, that he has less definition than his col- league the Reasonable Man, who has been pictured over and over again in judicial decisions. All that we can say by way of justifying his appearance here is that he serves as a convenient stand-in for the flesh-and-blood and quite individual if un- exceptional people with whom the law deals in the usual course. The first article in this symposium seeks to describe the attitudes past and pres- ent of the common man toward the legal system. Then a number of contributors in Part II consider how law impinges on him as litigant or party in various familiar settings ranging from the traffic court to the probate court, and from the small claims court to the court of general jurisdiction in which he brings his once-in-a- lifetime big accident case. But the common man is not only a subject and ob- ject of law; he is also a helper, as witness and juror, in carrying on the adjudicative process. He is examined as such in the articles in Part III, where a forthcoming piece of research into the jury as a working institution is also discussed. The costs of justice for the common man are analyzed in Part IV from a number of points of view. Part V, to some extent renewing and enlarging upon themes of reform which are sounded elsewhere in the volume, deals with certain improvements in the less esoteric reaches of legal procedure and with methods of bringing them about. The series ends with an article emphasizing the value of continuous inquiry into the actual consequences of legal administration. It is well to note that our concern is with administration or procedure as distin- guished from substance, although our contributors have wisely chosen not to limit themselves strictly. (The records of the Better Business Bureaus are a homely re- minder that the common man may not be perfectly served by the substantive law.) And civil rather than criminal justice is at the focus; this follows from the traits we attribute to our protagonist. Yet he does turn up all too often in the inferior criminal court and the traffic court, and therefore the symposium takes in those institutions. Finally, we concentrate on courts as distinguished from other adjudi- .cative agencies. This boundary is inconvenient, for not only is the common man affected intimately by the other agencies of law, notably various boards and com- missions, but it is a natural and significant question whether the courts have any- thing to learn from the other agencies with which they are in a sense competing. We have invited some crossing of the boundary in connection with workmen's com- pensation and labor arbitration. According to the habit of law teachers, the editors are content to leave the fram- ing of conclusions to the reader, and especially so (to speak with candor) since they doubt that they have the art to impose any novel generalizations upon the totality of these separate studies. It would surprise no one, for example, to be told that in the second half of the twentieth century legal procedure still falls far short of reasonable and reasonably attainable goals. vii

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most