ADDRESSES A Progressive Judiciary ANNUAL ADDRESS BY HON. A. D. FOLLETT, OF MARIETTA It is a common complaint of laymen that lawyers, particularly those who expound and enforce the law upon the bench, are worshipers of precedent, and do not develop with or respond to the advancing thought of this age of evolution in all branches of mental activity, but always have their faces turned backward to the wisdom of bygone ages, and are wholly governed by the opinions of those who knew nothing of modern conditions of life. On the other hand, it is a common complaint by lawyers against the bench that it is removing the ancient land-marks of the law, ignoring the doctrine of stare decisis, and overturning doctrines established by a long line of published decisions of the same court. These complaints come generally from eminent leaders of the bar, because the complaints are generally directed against decisions which restrict, to an extent greater than existing precedent, liberty of individual action, in regard to both personal and property rights, and particularly liberty of corporate action in regard to its corporate and property rights, and the interests. adversely affected by such decisions always employ eminent counsel. Lawyers as a class are conservative, because every influence of their education has tended to make them such. Their study and thought has been to ascertain what the law is, and not what it should be, and to regard the law as a fixed science, with fully established rules applicable to all cases, which rules have only to be ascertained, and then logically applied to any existing set of facts, to work out, if not complete justice, that |