Court house

“ The front rooms could be used for clients who were so important that they should be seen; the back rooms were for such as brought business, but not necessarily fame. Driving through this street, the wives of the lawyers could lean forward in their carriages and if their husbands were busy, they could smile and bow; if their husbands were idle, they could look straight ahead.
He passed under the shadow of the old court-house where in his prime he had fought his legal battles against the commonwealth. ”

“ About the Court-house the streets were thronged for a square on either side—horses, carriages, men. The autumn court was an important one. Farmers were not so pressed, there was leisure to look outside of their own fields; men of the town, of distant towns, of farms far and near, of mountain cabins, thronged the steps and the bit of green about the house and the street, back to the small houses and narrow pavements built about it like a court when the town was a village a century and more ago. ”

“ The court house has always been a very attractive place to the people of the frontier. It supplied the place of theatres, lecture and concert rooms, and other places of interest and amusement, in the older settlements and towns. The leading lawyers and judges were the star actors, and had each his partisans. Hence crowds attended the courts to see the judges, to hear the lawyers contend with argument, and law, and wit for success, victory, and fame. The merits and ability of the leading advocates ”

“ Some person or persons have entered the Court House Building in the night, without authority and have damaged Said building and have greatly annoyed the citizens living nearby by violently ringing the bell. ”

“ Chamber business may be done, and often is done, on the street, in the judge's own house, at the hotel where he stops, when absent from home, or it may be done in transitu, on the cars in going from one place to another within the proper jurisdiction to hold court. Mr. Justice Field could, as well, and as authoritatively, issue a temporary injunction, grant a writ of habeas corpus, an order to show cause, or do any other chamber business for the district in the dining-room at Lathrop, as at his chambers in San Francisco, or in the court-room. ”

“ But no sight-seer, no student of our institutions, and particularly no one who is interested in the ways and customs of individual trades, should fail to visit the Supreme Appellate Tribunal of this great country.
The funny thing about the House of Lords [Pg 119] sitting as a court is that it actually sits in the House of Lords. Entering the great red chamber—as anybody may do if he can find the way—one receives the impression that it is perfectly empty, save for the knot of barristers’ clerks, solicitors’ clerks, pressmen and casual onlookers who are huddled round the entrance. ”

“ A rusty village which has not enterprise enough to keep its public buildings in repair, and whose very Court-house, now in the last decrepit years of a slothful life, has for years leaked dirty water on the heads of the sleepy lawyers who burrow in its dingy lower rooms ”

“ The stranger is naturally drawn hence to the Court House, where, by calling a clerk from his routine in a room fairly lined and stuccoed with bundles of legal papers, he may get a glimpse of the famous "witch-pins." ”

“ Other prominent buildings are the United States court house and post office, the state supreme court house, the county court house, the state penitentiary, the state armoury and the executive mansion. The penitentiary is to a large extent self-supporting ”

“ By the way, do not speak of the mansion as “the house;” that is scarcely respectful, and is contrary to usage. You mention it always as “the Court.” You shall go down, Joan, to the Court after you have partaken of some refreshment. ”

“ The provision following the authorization to acquire the land, 'and thereon to erect and build a court house and prison,' was no more than a direction to the trustees as to the mode of use to be made of the land after it had been purchased. ”

“ A court house, of which only two sides are visible. The footlights would almost correspond with a line drawn from one angle to the opposite one. On the left to the front is the raised seat of the public Minister. Further back, to the left, the court. Facing the audience, successively, counsels’ bench; the defendants’ bench, a little raised ”

“ Its inhabitants numbered perhaps two hundred and fifty, a few of them colored. It had a gaunt, shaky court-house and jail, a store or two, and two taverns. The two taverns are needed to accommodate the judges and lawyers and their clients during the session of the court. The court is the only excitement and the only amusement. It is the event from which other events date. Everybody in the county knows exactly when court sits, and when court breaks. ”

“ In the House of Lords appeals are equally informal and colloquial, an impression that is heightened by the absence of wigs and gowns, so far as the bench is concerned, and by the very casual manner in which the half dozen gentlemen composing the court are seated. The house itself is a large, oblong chamber with steep tiers of seats, upholstered in red leather, which rise high up the side walls and upon which the peers sit when legislating, but which are, of course, empty when the court only sit. ”

“ There are two jails, one for the boys, one for the girls; a library, a school-house, a chapel, bank, and a well-organized banking and currency system. There is a court, and there is a judge, who is elected every year by the citizens. From this court an appeal lies in certain cases to a Supreme Court chosen by the boys from the Board of Trustees, but this court only passes on the regularity of the proceedings in the court below, that is, on what might be regarded as equivalent to constitutional and jurisdictional questions. ”

“ St. 500) ; as also a grant to county commissioners and their successors in office of a tract of land with a brick court house thereon erected, 'in trust for the use of said county, in fee simple,' the statute under which the purchase was made authorizing the acquisition of the property for the purpose of a court house, jail, and offices for the safe-keeping of the records (Seebold v. Shitler, 34 Pa. St. 133) . Similarly a devise of land to a religious body in fee, 'there to build a meeting house upon,' etc., was held to pass an unqualified estate (Griffitts v. Cope, 17 Pa. St. 96) ”

“ The May 1798 Fairfax County Court Order Book did specify that the courthouse should be forty-by-thirty feet with a twelve-foot portico, the gaol forty-by-twenty, the clerk's office twenty-by-eighteen and covered with slate or tile, a gaoler's house twenty-four-by-eighteen feet, and that stocks, pillory and whipping post also be provided by letting the entire [Pg 59] "... building of the same to the lowest bidder." ”

“ He generally sits every week-day for three or four hours in the justice-room of the Mansion-House; presides over the sittings of the Court of Aldermen, where they do all but talk each other to death. He is a judge of the Central Criminal Court, and of the Sessions at Guildhall; holds eight courts a year as Conservator of the Thames; besides being a justice of the peace for Southwark, a trustee of St. Paul’s, and a governor both of Greenwich Hospital and King’s College. ”

“ The best preparation for the scenes met with in [Pg 278] a court of justice, is the house of prayer; though even here there is a strange contrast between the peace and quietness of the church, and the bustle, broil, and turmoil usually attendant on the administration of criminal justice.
At twelve o’clock, on the day of trial, August 9th, 1797, the Lord Chief Baron Macdonald took his seat upon the bench, in the criminal court. Mr. Justice Heath presided in the Nisi Prius. ”

“ Each of these is holding what is practically a separate court and his title is of no significance. When one remembers that at the same time the House of Lords is sitting at Westminster, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Downing Street, the four [189] Criminal Courts at the Old Bailey, more than twenty police magistrates at Bow Street and elsewhere, and County Courts, at Bloomsbury, Clerkenwell, Edmonton, Marylebone, Shoreditch, Southwark and Westminster, some idea may be formed of the number of judges and courts always at work in the metropolis. ”

“ IN A PARTICULAR COURT—"GOING SPECIAL"—LIST OF SPECIALS AND LEADERS—SIGNIFICANCE OF GOWNS AND "WEEPERS"—"BANDS"—"COURT COATS"—WIGS IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS—BARRISTERS' BAGS, BLUE AND RED.
The Bar is divided into two separate parts—the Common Law Bar and the Chancery Bar; for a barrister does not try cases of both kinds as in America. The solicitor knows whether he has a law or equity case in hand, and takes it to the appropriate barrister. Common law barristers have their chambers chiefly in the Middle Temple and Inner Temple ”

“ I hardly expected the grand jury to sustain me, after they saw everything different from what it had been while I was there. Yet they did, and their report to the court advises all the changes made that I had proposed. ”

“ The statutes of the United States, and the established practice of the courts, require that the judge perform a very large share of his judicial labors at what is called 'chambers.' This chamber work is as important, as necessary, as much a discharge of his official duty, as that performed in the courthouse. Important cases are often argued before the judge at any place convenient to the parties concerned, and a decision of the judge is arrived at by investigations made in his own room, wherever he may be ”

“ On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. ”

“ The contention is that the law giving jurisdiction, as against a person not a citizen of the district where suit is brought to remove a cloud from the title to real estate situated therein, applies only to cases where there are two or more defendants, at least one of whom must be found in the district where the suit is brought; that the jurisdiction exists to entertain a suit, like the one before us, where there are two or more defendants, but not where there is only one. ”

“ The inefficiency of the system of courts and judicial procedure is shown in the practical workings of the civil courts of New York City. The antiquated organization of all the courts is like a patchwork quilt where each additional one has been added or increased as New York has grown from a village below the Indian stockade at Wall Street to its present size. ”

“ A court of justice is built everywhere much in the same fashion—​a throne for the judge, benches right and left for the sheriff and municipal authorities, boxes on each side for the juries, separate pews for the warder and clerk of the court, convenient seats for the barristers. Then there is the witness-box, the dock, and benches piled tier over tier for the convenience of the spectators, and, as a matter of course, the ventilation is radically bad. ”

“ With the aid of a servant on one side and of the lawyer on the other, however, he was got out of the carriage, and, almost supporting him, the lawyer, who had made all his arrangements previously, led him into the building by a private door and to the chamber in which the tribunal was sitting by a private passage used only by the magistrates, and opening into the court in the immediate vicinity of the seats occupied by them, by the side of which a chair had been assigned to the Marchese. ”

“ Higley to be the almost uniform rule, among the people who make the common law of England the basis of their jurisprudence, to have a distinct tribunal for the establishment of wills, and the administration of the estates of men dying either with or without wills, which tribunals are variously called 'prerogative courts,' 'probate courts,' 'surrogate courts,' 'orphans' courts,' etc. ”

“ In the New England States it is held that a judgment obtained against a town may be levied upon and made out of the property of any inhabitant of the town. The suit in those States is brought in form against the inhabitants of the town, naming it; the individual inhabitants, it is said, may and do appear and defend the suit, and hence it is held that the individual inhabitants have their day in court, are each bound by the judgment, and that it may be collected from the property of any one of them. ”

“ From seven o'clock in the morning a crowd was stationed at the iron gates, and an hour before the trial commenced the hall was full of the privileged. Before the entrance of the magistrates, and indeed frequently afterwards, a court of justice, on days when some especial trial is to take place, resembles a drawing-room where many persons recognize each other and converse if they can do so without losing their seats ”

“ Up and down a passage which leads to the jury-room and to the private entrances into the court, one may see the attorneys in their Sunday shabby-genteel, and in great bustle and importance, running backwards and forwards, now halting to confab with gentlemen who are relations of the prisoners, or are subpœnaed witnesses—​now with the barristers who wear stereotyped smiles upon their faces, as if law life was a pleasant dream. ”

“ The modern court-room is only an adapted continuation of a medieval idea. On the raised dais under an unsanitary and dusty canopy of green plush sits the judge; instead of a sceptre he holds the gavel. ”

“ Those found upon any part of the block belong to each and every tract of which it is composed, and if sufficient lines and corners can be found they determine the location of the entire block, without regard to its calls for adjoiners or for waters, if such calls conflict with the lines actually run upon the ground and returned.' He added: 'It requires neither argument nor citation of authority to show that the learned judge was clearly right in thus instructing the jury.' 98 Pa. ”