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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

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