Our Methods of Legislation and Their Defects (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

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Excerpt from Our Methods of Legislation and Their Defects

In an action decided by the Court of Appeals in September, 1875 (the matter of Kiernan), the Chief Justice of our State, delivering the opinion of the Court of Last Resort, said that it was not safe for him to speak confidently of the exact condition of the law in respect to public improvements in the cities of New York and Brooklyn; "the enactments in reference thereto had been modified, superseded, and repealed so often and to such an extent that it is difficult to ascertain just what statutes were in force at any particular time."

This emphatic declaration, now upward of three years in the reports of the Appellate Court of the State as its deliberate opinion, should long since have awakened general public attention and caused some organized co-operation with the view of remedying this evil. To allow our legislation to come into hopeless confusion as to interests in the city and county of New York and in the city of Brooklyn, representing as they do upward of one half of the taxable property of the State and about a third of its population, in itself shows an apathy on the part of our citizens lamentable in the extreme, and to permit it to continue so is a crime. If the laws in relation to public improvements in those two cities are in a state to make it difficult for the Court of Last Resort to determine what the actual condition of the law is, how ridiculous becomes the assumption of the law which presumes every layman to know it; and what must be the condition of the statutory law of our State in relation to matters that are not public improvements, because as to them at least the Corporation Counsels of those two cities, men of ability generally, pay some attention to getting them into some harmonious and proper shape.

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