From the diary of a lawyer
Bernat Friedmann and the writing experts
The various histories of the lawyers' second home, the courtroom, draw our attention to a number of factors that have fundamentally shaped the nature of the legal profession. In addition to the behaviour of lawyers in court, it is particularly interesting to note the presence of other professionals who came into contact with the defence during the proceedings.
During the dualist era, lawyers were - to a large extent - disparaging of professions that were less mature; for example, in a recent article by Bernat Friedmann, he considered the profession of writing expert to be superfluous. Friedmann, who acted as defence counsel in the Tiszaeszlár trial, had the following opinion of 'scribes':
"I have been at war with them all my life as a lawyer. I never wanted to acknowledge them as actual experts. I always argued that a judge can write and compare papers. So you look at the writings yourself. It is not a science. So the scribe is not an expert. He cannot be compared to a doctor, a chemist or any other specialist. They go to university for years. They study. They have a large, scientific literature. So their opinion carries some weight. But the so-called peer reviewer: nothing. He can write. The judge should know that. He has a little experience, perhaps. The judge must have more. So it is unnecessary to use the scrivener as an expert."
It was certainly not an unavoidable issue for lawyers to employ only experts in courtrooms who had at least some level of training. The lawyers wanted to use a combination of tools to influence the proceedings in the courtroom, and it is understandable that they also had strong opinions about the experts they called. Of course, in the article quoted by Bernat Friedmann, he also cited a specific case of a boy who forged dozens of bills of exchange in the name of his elderly father:
"A joint hearing of the case has begun. The case has been jointly tried and the father and son have stood by their testimony. But so did the experts. All six declared the signatures to be genuine. The presiding judge was about to declare the proceedings closed, when I stood up and made the request that I should have one more question for the experts, but that I should be sent out of the courtroom first, so that I could explain my submission without them hearing it. It was allowed. I then took out three fully completed bills of exchange, similar to the ones I had taken with me, on which only the father's signature as acceptor was missing, and I asked the son to write his father's name on them in the presence of the court, without using a specimen, in the capacity of acceptor, as on the other bills. He did so. I then proposed that these three notorious forgeries should be mixed with the others and that the experts should be called again to examine the bills handed over to them afresh and thoroughly, to see if they could not find one or two forged signatures. After half an hour's examination, they declared that they were all genuine and none of them forged. That was enough for me. Then my tongue started to wag: "This is the science of literacy experts!"
During the dualist era, lawyers were - to a large extent - disparaging of professions that were less mature; for example, in a recent article by Bernat Friedmann, he considered the profession of writing expert to be superfluous. Friedmann, who acted as defence counsel in the Tiszaeszlár trial, had the following opinion of 'scribes':
"I have been at war with them all my life as a lawyer. I never wanted to acknowledge them as actual experts. I always argued that a judge can write and compare papers. So you look at the writings yourself. It is not a science. So the scribe is not an expert. He cannot be compared to a doctor, a chemist or any other specialist. They go to university for years. They study. They have a large, scientific literature. So their opinion carries some weight. But the so-called peer reviewer: nothing. He can write. The judge should know that. He has a little experience, perhaps. The judge must have more. So it is unnecessary to use the scrivener as an expert."
It was certainly not an unavoidable issue for lawyers to employ only experts in courtrooms who had at least some level of training. The lawyers wanted to use a combination of tools to influence the proceedings in the courtroom, and it is understandable that they also had strong opinions about the experts they called. Of course, in the article quoted by Bernat Friedmann, he also cited a specific case of a boy who forged dozens of bills of exchange in the name of his elderly father:
"A joint hearing of the case has begun. The case has been jointly tried and the father and son have stood by their testimony. But so did the experts. All six declared the signatures to be genuine. The presiding judge was about to declare the proceedings closed, when I stood up and made the request that I should have one more question for the experts, but that I should be sent out of the courtroom first, so that I could explain my submission without them hearing it. It was allowed. I then took out three fully completed bills of exchange, similar to the ones I had taken with me, on which only the father's signature as acceptor was missing, and I asked the son to write his father's name on them in the presence of the court, without using a specimen, in the capacity of acceptor, as on the other bills. He did so. I then proposed that these three notorious forgeries should be mixed with the others and that the experts should be called again to examine the bills handed over to them afresh and thoroughly, to see if they could not find one or two forged signatures. After half an hour's examination, they declared that they were all genuine and none of them forged. That was enough for me. Then my tongue started to wag: "This is the science of literacy experts!"
Dr. Friedmann Bernát: Az irástudók (Egy védő naplójából) [The scribes (From the diary of a lawyer)]. A Jog, 1886. május 2. 142-143.