While the Federal courts in each State are required by the Conformity Act to follow the procedure of the State in actions at law, they are free of such restriction in proceedings in equity, and on that side their practice is uniform throughout the country. The Federal Equity Rules of 1912, promulgated by the Supreme Court in that year, are another landmark in the struggle for reform of procedure, simplifying and modernizing, as they did, a technical but important class of litigations, not only locally but in every State in the Union.
Since the great period of commercial expansion which culmi nated in the Spanish-American War, the best minds at the Ameri can bar have more and more had forced upon them an apprecia tion of the inadequacy of the courts to dispose efficiently of the volume of work being brought into them. Inspired by the delays and uncertainties which marred the work of the regular courts of law, two strong movements away from the courts have mani fested themselves. First is the tendency to create administrative quasi-judicial tribunals, manned presumably by experts and un hampered by the traditions and rules of evidence and procedure which strike the average layman and legislator as being respon sible for the clumsiness of the courts. In Federal matters instances are the Inter-State Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the appeal boards for taxes and customs, and num erous minor bodies in Government departments ; in the individual States the Workmen's Compensation Boards and the Public Utility Commissions show a similar drift. In so far as such bodies relieve the courts of difficult and technical questions of fact, they are an unmixed blessing; at the same time they are unavoidably creating, each in its peculiar field, bodies of precedent and law which are making ever more difficult and multifarious the science of juris prudence. The second tendency away from the courts is the reaction of the business man rather than the legislator, impatient of the ignorance of juries and the stump speeches of eloquent counsel. This induces the growth of arbitration of commercial
disputes by trade bodies or organizations on behalf of their mem bers. Large classes of commercial differences are thus kept out of the courts and, as knowledge of the benefits to be gained by this method, and confidence in it, spreads, it will be more and more resorted to. To suppose, however, that there is satisfaction with the results so far accomplished is an error, for many influ ences are at work to negative the value of these improvements.
The greatest promise for reform in methods of procedure lies in the spread of admiration in the United States for the success achieved by the English courts in simplifying procedure, under the system introduced in the Judicature Acts, by which procedure is regulated not by statutory enactment but by flexible rules made by the courts themselves. A strong movement has developed for the adoption of this system both in the Federal and in the State courts in the United States, forwarded by the writings and utterances of Chief Justice William H. Taft and Elihu Root among public men, Dean Roscoe Pound of Harvard, Dean John H. Wigmore of Northwestern and Prof. Edson R. Sunderland of Michigan among scholars, Thomas W. Shelton of Virginia, Moor field Story of Massachusetts and others among practising lawyers, and most of all, by the American Judicature Society and its secre tary, Herbert Harley, under the munificent endowment of Charles F. Ruggles of Michigan. The nation-wide improvement in Federal equity practice under the rules of 1912 has demonstrated the efficacy of this line of approach.
Pound has prepared a complete bibliog raphy of procedural reform which he has brought down to 1920 in the form in which it is printed in 5 Mass. Law Quarterly, 332. See also Hepburn, Development of Code Pleading (1897) ; Rosenbaum, The Rule-making Authority in the English Supreme Court (1917); Bulle tins of American Judicature Society; and Annual Reports of American Bar Association. (S. R. R.)