Scientific Assessors in Courts of Justice

Abstract

PUBLIC attention has lately been called, by various incidents, to the system under which the trial of scientific cases, and especially those in which the respective rights of rival inventors are involved, is at present conducted in courts of justice. Last week Mr. Justice Kay decided a case in which the Edison-Swan United Electric Company were plaintiffs, which lasted twenty-one whole days, or about one-tenth of the legal year; and it is possible that it may occupy very much more time in the Court of Appeal, where every day is equivalent to three days in ordinary courts, because three judges sit here, and again in the House of Lords, if the litigants decide to proceed to extremities, as they very frequently do in cases of this magnitude and importance. At the same time, Mr. Justice Kekewich was engaged in trying another large electric patent case; the Court of Appeal had a similar case occupying it for several days, in the course of which Lord Justice Cotton, who presided, animadverted in somewhat severe terms on the length to which such cases are allowed to run. His Lordship, with the concurrence of the two Lords Justices who sat with him, attributed this to the manner in which counsel spun out their arguments, and urged more brevity and conciseness. Whatever may have been the circumstances in the case to which the Lord Justice adverted, it is certain that the addresses of the eminent counsel engaged in the Edison-Swan case were not responsible for the twenty-one days which it occupied before Mr. Justice Kay—not including seven or eight days for experiments;—by far the greater part of this time was occupied in hearing the contradictory and conflicting evidence of a score of scientific men, many of the greatest eminence, on the points in dispute between the parties. With these points we have absolutely nothing to do here. It is sufficient to say that the case involved the investigation and decision of matters of the utmost complexity respecting the applications of recent electrical discoveries to lighting, and also some obscure questions in the history of these applications. All these exceedingly complicated and difficult questions were tried before an eminent judge, who, as he said himself at the commencement of his judgment, “has not had the requisite scientific training.” It was, in fact, necessary to begin by instructing the judge in the elements of electrical science; the propositions which scientific men accept as truisms, or as common knowledge in discussions amongst themselves, had here to be gone over ab initio in order to inform the judge's mind respecting the A B C of the problem which he had to solve. As to Mr. Justice Kay's success in the task of acquiring this information, we are quite willing to accept the opinion of one of the leading electrical papers, which says that “the manner in which the judge grasped the bearing of the technical evidence has been the subject of remark amongst everyone present in court.”