Law's Harmonizer

TREATISE ON EVIDENCE-John Henry Wigmore-Little, Brown (10 Vols. $100).

With all its imperfections, at which irreverent laymen are inclined to yah-yah, the English and American Common Law is the world's most sensitive instrument of justice. Its scales have been adjusted during more than 600 years of human experience with the same basic procedure: jury trial.b For the presentation of evidence, the raw material of justice, English law by the end of the 19th Century had arrived at a stable system of rules. Not so, however, U. S. law, which has not one but 50 legal systems (48 State courts, Federal Courts, District of Columbia courts). Without some central fulcrum, the scales of U. S. justice would have varied more & more widely according to local precedent.

Since the beginning of the century that fulcrum has been supplied by the scholarship of John Henry Wigmore. First published in 1904, his Treatise on Evidence is recognized by lawyers as one of the most important legal works ever produced in the U. S. Cited by the courts as often as any text, it has provided a standard source from which judges and lawyers can ascertain the origin, reason and status of the rules of evidence. Useless rules, ill-trained judges, an unskilled bar are the targets of its clarity. The third and final revised edition of the Treatise, now published, is a 7,000-page exposition with citations to 85,000 cases, 20,000 statutes.

The author of this monumental job was born 77 years ago in San Francisco of an Irish father and English mother (who, he says, never really had a place in society because they did not arrive in San Francisco until 1851). He went to Harvard Law School, practiced in Boston, taught at Keio University between 1889 and 1892 (where he helped introduce baseball to Japan), and from 1901 to 1929 was Dean of the Northwestern University Law School. Always called Mister (not Professor), Dean Wigmore did not retire when he became Dean Emeritus, but moved his office to the first floor of the Law School, near the front entrance, where he would be easier to get at. Every Wednesday and Saturday for at least 30 years he has spent at home, scrawling in longhand with an ordinary old-fashioned pen.

A tall, slender old man with a well-brushed mustache and deep-set, friendly blue eyes, Dean Wigmore's passion for harmonizing the law of evidence is accompanied by a passion for just harmonizing. Words or music or both of nearly every song in the Northwestern Law School song book were his composition; he has also privately printed a book of songs called Lyrics of a Lawyer.

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