appeal for the protection of property and business, not to the police or to the administrative authorities, but to courts of equity. What in other lands was committed to administration and inspection and supervision in advance of action, we left to the courts, preferring to show the individual his duty by a general law, to leave him free to act according to his judgment, and to prosecute him and impose the predetermined penalty in case his free action infringed the law. In other words, where some peoples went to one extreme and were bureau-ridden, we went to the other extreme and were law-ridden. Legislative justice died more slowly. In colonial America it was the ordinary thing, preserving the memory of the judicial functions of the High Court of Parliament. Legislative divorces were known in New York after the Revolution, and in Ohio, Maryland, Connecticut and Rhode Island in the nineteenth century. Pennsylvania did not abolish them until 1874.3 As late as 1887 the dissolution of a particular marriage was held a rightful subject of legislation by a territory of the United States. The next year the legislature of Alabama" passed a private divorce act, which, however, was held invalid. Acts of attainder and bills of pains and penalties, which are no more than legislative criminal prosecutions, were not uncommon in America during and after the Revolution. The legislature of Rhode Island exercised jurisdiction in insolvency until 1832. During the Revolution and 1 Kent, Comm. ii, 97. Bingham vs. Miller, 17 Ohio St., 445; Cronise vs. Cronise, 54 Pa. St., 260; Crane vs. Meginnis, 1 Gill & J., 474; Starr vs. Pease, 8 Conn., 541; Eaton, Development of the Judicial System in Rhode Island, 14 Yale Law Journal, 148, 153. 3 See Loyd, Early Courts of Pennsylvania, 102. 5 Jones vs. Jones, 95 Ala., 593. 6 Thompson vs. Carr, 5 N. H., 511; Cooper vs. Telfair, 4 Dall., 14; Sleight vs. Kane, 2 Johns. Cas., 236; Jackson vs. Sands, 2 Johns. Cas., 267; Thompson, Anti-Loyalist Legislation during the American Revolution, 3 Illinois Law Review, 81, 147. 'Eaton, Development of the Judicial System in Rhode Island, 14 Yale Law Journal, 148, 150-153. even later the practice obtained in some states of awarding a new trial by legislative act after final judgment, and a general appellate jurisdiction was exercised by the legislature in Rhode Island till 1857, and by the senate in New York till 1847.10 But the nineteenth century saw the end of legislative justice. Legislative divorces ceased in England in 1856, and are now precluded by constitutional provisions in the several United States. The federal constitution put an end to bills of attainder and bills of pains and penalties in this country, and English writers were speaking of them in the eighteenth century as vicious in principle and substantially obsolete.11 The abortive bill of pains and penalties brought against Queen Caroline is probably the last of its kind. In consequence of constitutional provisions, the courts put an end to the legislative granting of new trials early in the last century, and legislative appellate jurisdiction ended in this country in 1857. Adjustment of claims against the state by legislative assemblies still disgraces the public law of many commonwealths. In England, however, by virtue of statutes, claims against the crown, after a formal petition of right and fiat, take the ordinary course of judicial proceedings. And the federal government, as well as an increasing number of the states, by providing courts of claims, has put justice between state and citizen on a footing of law rather than of politics. This obsolescence of legislative justice apparently completed the legal structure founded by fourteenth-century judges, builtup so laboriously by Coke and fixed in American institutions by the federal constitution and the fourteenth amendment. We had achieved in very truth a Rechtsstaat. Our government was one of laws and not of men. Administration had become "only a very Merrill vs. Sherburne, 1 N. H., 199, 216. 10 An account of the abolition of this jurisdiction, and of the reasons therefore, may be found in Browne, The New York Court of Appeals, 2 Green Bag, 277, 278. "Wooddesson, Lect. II, 382 ff. subordinate agency in the whole process of government." 12 Complete elimination of the personal equation in all matters affecting the life, liberty, property or fortune of the citizen seemed to have been attained. The distinctive characteristic of American public law of the nineteenth century is the completeness with which administrative action is tied down by legal liability and judicial review. Indeed, the tendency was strong to commit to the courts matters of clearly executive nature, and it is noteworthy that the first cases in which acts of Congress were held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States involved this particular violation of the constitutional separation of governmental powers. 13 But the paralysis of administration produced by our American exaggeration of the common-law doctrine of supremacy of law brought about a reaction. And that reaction, as the last remnants of legislative justice were disappearing, brought back the long-obsolete executive justice, and has been making it an ordinary feature of our government. Contemporary legislation shows clearly enough that this revival of executive justice is gaining strength continually. There is now a strong tendency to take away judicial review of administrative action wherever it is constitutionally possible to do so, and where it is not possible, to cut down such review to the unavoidable minimum. This is manifest especially in recent legislation for the regulation of public utilities. An avowed object. of the recent acts upon this subject is to do away with formal litigation in the courts and to substitute free inquiry by administrative tribunals, whose decisions are made final so far as possible.1 But the reaction has gone much beyond restriction of ju 4 12 Amos, Science of Law, 397. 13 In re Heyburn, 2 Dall., 409; U. S. vs. Todd, 13 How., 52, n. 14 Downey, Regulation of Urban Utilities in Iowa, 81. In the model public utility law proposed by the Department on Regulation of Utilities of the National Civic Federation it is provided: "In the conduct of all hearings and investigations the commission shall not be bound by the technical rules of evidence. No informality of any proceeding or in the manner of taking testimony before the commission or any commissioner |