Chapter XXXIII: Introduction

Before administering law between litigating parties, there are two things to be done--in addition to the parties themselves--namely, first to ascertain the subject for decision, and, secondly, to complicate it so as to make it difficult to decide. This is effected by letting the lawyers state in complicated terms the simple cases of their clients, and thus raising from these opposition statements a mass of entanglement which the clients themselves might call nasty crotchets, but which the lawyers term "nice points." In every subject of dispute with two sides to it, there is a right and a wrong, but in the style of putting the contending statements, so as to confuse the right and the wrong together, the science of special pleading consists. This system is of such remote antiquity, that nobody knows the beginning of it, and this accounts for no one being able to appreciate its end. The accumulated chicanery and blundering of several generations, called in forensic language the "wisdom of successive ages," gradually brought special pleading into its present shape, or, rather, into its present endless forms. Its extensive drain on the pockets of the suitors has rendered it always an important branch of legal study, while, when properly understood, it appears an instrument so beautifully calculated for distributive justice, that, when brought to bear upon property, it will often distribute the whole of it among the lawyers, and leave nothing for the litigants themselves.