As the situation now stands, it is impracticable for the average litigant always to get Justice in the average case, for the lawyer he employs often can not properly investigate all the law, that is the multifarious and conflicting authorities, and prepare his briefs without an expenditure of labor and of time out of all proportion to the real value of the services to the client. Often an astute lawyer, either by reason of his ability, his ingenuity or his good fortune, locates or stumbles across a line of authorities which, while not correct in principle, are sufficiently weighty to impress the trial Judge, and the lawyer on the other side is either not sufficiently learned or sufficiently industrious to get the correct decisions on the other side which conflict with and which, if used in argument, would overcome those presented by his opponent. This results in more mistakes and errors in Trial Courts than should occur, and often, indeed very generally, it is impossible, for financial reasons, for the loser to take an appeal.
Lucien Hugh Alexander, Memorandum in re Corpus Juris, 22 Green Bag 59, 84 (1910)
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