Is Zat So!
Camden Courier-Post - February 24, 1938
Freed from the restraint of judicial dignity, former Supreme Court Justice Frank T. Lloyd is back to the simple pleasures of the barrister once more. The justice makes no bones about his release from the ermine. After 30 years tied to judicial duties he told me the other day he “felt like a man free from prison.”
“Maybe that’s hardly the right comparison,” laughed the jurist, “but let’s say that I feel like a boy out of school. You know that’s a trying position, being on the Supreme bench.”
“I’ll say that I went through 2000 books a year. The worst of the experience was that you never were free from your work. Don’t mistake my meaning. You spent your day in the chambers or in the courtroom, then when you went to bed at night the problems, the cases, the decisions, the opinions all raced through your mind during the night.”
“So you like the work of getting back into practice?” we asked the justice.
“Yes sir,” he replied. Then his eyes twinkled as we suggested that perhaps he might run against a contretemps sometime.
“I want to be around the courtroom,” I told the justice, “when you begin to slam an opinion or precedent and find you set them both.”
Might Happen Here All Right
“You know,” he said seriously, “such a thing could easily happen. In fact, it did to one of my colleagues. You can’t keep track of thousands of opinions a year. No man can.”
“To refer to my colleague on the supreme bench. He was hearing an argument one day, shortly before I retired from the bench. Counsel for one of the litigants quoted an opinion given in a case similar to the one being heard, and in which my colleague made a ruling. It was apparent the justice did not hold much sympathy with the opinion which had just been read. ‘Who wrote that opinion’ my colleague asked, rather sharply. ‘Well,’ counsel smiled, ‘with all due reference to the court, you did.’”
“Now,” laughed the former justice, “it won’t do for me to make any arguments unless I’m pretty sure of the origin of the decisions and precedents I quote.”
If Justice Lloyd becomes mellow with his release from the judicial serfdom which he says he feels his present freedom to be, I figure New Jersey has judges who should be summarily pushed right into the lay ranks as speedily as possible.
This Garden States, with Hague in Jersey City and some of the judges who wear its ermine, should be rather tolerant of doings below the Hague-Sweatshop Line.
When we scan the destruction of civil liberty in Jersey City, and read some of the unholy decisions of the bench, we stand aghast.