March 1887: The Law Journal editors were critical of Third Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Joseph Bradley’s grant of habeas corpus to Oscar Baldwin, a Newark bank cashier convicted of misapplying funds and making false entries and statements. Bradley said the district court, in stating Baldwin’s three prison terms should not run concurrently, failed to specify the order in which they were to be served. “Most people regard technicalities of this kind as merely a convenient means of letting favored criminals escape, and the moral effect of it is bad,” the editors said.
100 Years Ago
March 1912: Gov. Woodrow Wilson, in a published letter, reconsidered his opposition to state government initiative and referendum. “I found in the men who had advocated these things, who had put them into operation, and who had accomplished things by them, not critics or opponents of representative government, but men who were eager to restore it where it had been taken — these means to recover for the people what they had unquestionably lost — control of their own affairs,” he wrote.
