Under the heading " Our Legal System," the Times of
Monday published a remarkably able letter, signed "S. S. C." The writer suggests that the pleadings in an action, and the delays allowed to a prosecutor, should be still further cur- tailed, and that "the strength of the Bench should be such as to enable every London action to be tried before it has been entered for trial a month." " S. S. C.'s " proposals as to circuit are equally excellent. " The circuits as they now exist should be abolished. Judicial centres should be established at, say, Durham, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff, and Exeter, with districts covering the whole country outside that allocated to London, which might consist of the Eastern and South-Eastern Counties, and in other directions a radius of, say, seventy or a hundred miles from town. High Court Judges should go down to these centres, say, on the 1st of every alternate month, and completely dispose of the cases entered for trial before leaving." Next, he proposes that County Court jurisdiction should be increased up to £100, and be unlimited by consent. The County Court Judges, further, should be given £2,000, and should deal, sitting as Stipendiary Chairmen of Quarter- Sessions, with criminal business at monthly Sessions. "Mur- der and a few other exceptionally important offences (the fewer the better) should be dealt with by the High Court Judges at the judicial centres." "S. S. C.'s " suggestions strike us as admirable. His plan for judicial centres main- tains the good of the circuit system without the evil.
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