Suchergebnisse

About the summer of 1875" Chief Justice Horace Gray of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts "began a practice, which he continued until the end of his judicial career, of employing a young graduate of the Harvard Law School as a secretary. At first he paid the expense of this from his own purse, but before he had been many years at Washington" as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States "the Government provided for the appointment of a clerk for each of the justices of the Supreme Court. His colleagues generally appointed as their clerks stenographers and typewriters, but Judge Gray continued his practice of securing each year a member of the graduating class from the Law School at Cambridge."' In the ensuing 98 years, Justice Gray's practice has become an established and familiar feature of the American judicial scene. Published accounts of the practice naturally have centered on the Supreme Court, and much of what we know rests on reminiscences of particular law clerks who served that Court.' But the practice prevails as well in most other appellate courts and in many trial courts.

Although court clerks occupy a strategic position in county government, they have not been examined in detail. Their crucial role in the budgetary process, coupled with the vast panoply of duties assigned them, elevates their office to semi-sovereign status within the county. The state of Florida was chosen as a focus for an indepth study of the clerk's office. The study revealed that despite the fact that clerks are well-educated, they are relatively unknowledgeable about modern technology and techniques to assist in the operation and management of their offices. This, coupled with the county court clerk's conservative nature, accounts in part for why states have been victims of archaic and outdated court systems and procedures.

Migration stories, says Abou Farman, are often told through the personal struggles and travails of the migrant, the great voyager figure of our most recent centuries, the harbinger of hybridity, the metaphor for risk, sacrifice, toil, abuse, inhumanity. And humanity.