	February 2000

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Some Low Points for Colorado's Bar

David Erickson is the CBA Historian and will share his findings with us as he discovers them. If you have any historical stories to share, send them to: Historian, 1900 Grant Street, Ninth Floor, Denver, CO 80203.

Judge Moses Hallett made the following comments at the time of his retirement from the U.S. District Court in Denver. Retirement proceedings, under the auspices of the Colorado Bar Association, were held in the Federal Building, Denver, May 1, 1906.

"Apparently we have fallen upon a period of decline in the law, the extent of which has not been estimated. The means of rescue from this condition is very nearly the whole problem of government. When the Bar and the Courts go wrong it is not reasonable to expect that any other department of government will be right. The philosophy of these movements is somewhat obscure, but they appear to be reciprocal, following the moral tendencies of the people. Just where we are at present in a period of back-sliding, whether at the bottom of the pit, or midway between hope and resurrection, is largely and perhaps entirely a matter of conjecture."

Speaking at the first annual meeting of the Colorado Bar Association in the Broadmoor Casino at Colorado Springs on July 7, 1898, the Hon. John E. Phillips, then the U.S. District Judge of Missouri, made the following comment: "Looking over the annual accounts of the outputs of the law schools . . ., and the census giving the number of lawyers and professional men in our country, the question came unbidden: What of lawyers in the future? Can they all flourish? If so, on what is the vast swarm to subsist?"

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