board and have the board appoint the head
of the department if it is a professional
department, that appointee being subject to
the approval of the governor.
Although in New Jersey the governor
appointed the commissioner of education,
it should certainly be a nonpolitical appoint-
ment. I was happy that the man I ap-
pointed commissioner of education was re-
appointed by two of my successors.
We have in our constitution a conditional
veto. This has been of tremendous help both
to the legislature and to the governor. Be-
cause frequently the purpose of a bill is
a good one. Due to faulty draftsmanship,
the governor in the absence of a condi-
tional veto must either veto it outright be-
cause it is faulty in part or with tongue
in cheek approve it hoping that in due
course the legislature will amend it.
We also have a provision which I com-
mend to you for your consideration. The
legislature comes back automatically after
forty-five days after adjourning sine die to
consider veto messages. To the extent it
was humanly possible for us to do so on
the basis of the then available knowledge,
we eliminated the vest pocket veto, and
the governor had to face up to every issue
and say yes, I am going to sign the bill or
no, I am not going to sign the bill, and this
is the reason I am not going to sign the
bill. or I am sending the bill back with a
conditional veto, and if you will incorporate
the following, spelled out in the veto mes-
sage, I will probably sign it.
In New Jersey our greatest problem was
the problem of the judiciary. We had every
known court that you could think of. We
were one of the last states to give up the
court of chancery that we had inherited
from our mother country. It can be said
justice delayed is justice denied, and in
New Jersey it was possible to delay justice
for a very long time, while appeals were
taken from one court to another.
We had the Court of Errors and Appeals
which was higher than the Supreme Court
for which provision was made for lay
judges on the Court of Errors and Appeals,
this being the Court of Last Resort, some-
times referred to as the Court of Errors
and no appeals. This was a check, you see,
within the judicial system, these laymen
were going to see to it that the lawyers
did justice even though they might not
know very much law.
We had a system whereby these lay
judges could practice law even while sitting
on the top court. We had one instance in |
my early days where a judge, lay judge,
wrote an opinion, he being a lawyer, and
then appeared before a common pleas judge
down at the bottom of the ladder and cited
his own decision as being conclusive evi-
dence of the fact the case should be de-
cided in favor of his client. Needless to
say that went out the window.
Many of the courts that we had were
discontinued, including justice of the peace.
I might add, we had thousands of justices
of the peace and there were people who
said, if you meddle with the justice of the
peace, you are going to have a tremendous
following against the constitution. Well, it
did not work out that way. It did not work
out that way because the citizens of New
Jersey back in 1947 were convinced that
these delegates that had worked through
one long, hot summer, had studied the whole
proposition thoroughly and had the courage
of their convictions and that they must be
right or they would not have made the pro-
posals.
One change we did not make that I think
we should have made, we continued county
courts even though the chief justice,
through his administrative assistant, had
authority to confer upon the county courts
the jurisdiction of superior courts, and to
have them hear cases in counties other
than their own, where the docket was over-
crowded. In retrospect I think it would
have been better had we simply had dis-
trict courts for minor municipal matters,
and one superior court system with a su-
preme court and let it go at that.
Well, I am sure you have your mind on
the ball game and I have talked longer that
I was told I should talk.
I might add I received the invitation to
address this august body about 3 o'clock
yesterday afternoon when I was in the
middle of a lot of busy appointments. I am
sure it can be said of you that you will
so conduct yourselves that it will be said
of your work, as James Madison said of
the work of the Convention in Philadelphia
in 1787, whatever may be the judgment
pronounced on the competency of the archi-
tects of the constitution, or whatever may
be the destiny of the edifice prepared by
them, I feel it a duty to express my pro-
found and solemn conviction derived from
my intimate opportunity of observing and
appreciating the views of the convention
collectively and individually, there never
was an assembly of men charged with a
greater and more arduous trust who were
more pure in their motives or more exclu-
sively or more anxiously devoted to the ob- |
