So far, therefore, the public has the remedy in its own hands.
A few martyrs to this legal tyranny, in the shape of witnesses preferring imprisonment to submission, would work a wonderful change in our law courts.
And it is by no means improbable that an improvement in these might be followed by improvements elsewhere, and that the intangible entity called “public interest” would not so often be allowed to shield the most unwarrantable breaches of confidence and invasions of domestic privacy.
Every man of course knows what he has to expect if he ventures to criticise the procedure of a court of law, or the conduct of a judge or barrister.
He is treated with contempt, as a person who must necessarily be in total ignorance of the subject under consideration.
In all professions there is a tendency to regard the comments of the outside public as not only worthless but impertinent.
The practice of the law is a comparative mystery to all but the practitioners themselves.
The forms of the court, the rules which regulate the examination of witnesses, what evidence is admissible and what is not, the very phraseology in which lawyers communicate with each other—all subjects of which nobody can acquire any knowledge whatever by the light of nature; and this consciousness of ignorance on the part of the public disposes them to look with a kind of awe on the interior of a court of justice, and to be very much at the mercy of any one of the hierophants who shall think proper to rebuke the presumption of an audacious and uninstructed critic.
It is too often forgotten by both sides that the professional man himself labours under disqualifications scarcely less serious than those of the intruder whom he ridicules.
The lawyer’s experience, his familiarity with technicalities so formidable to the unprofessional mind, and his personal acquaintance with the working of our judicial system, enable him to speak from a point of advantage in contending with a lay disputant, by which the latter is apt to be abashed.