of a jack-pot if it wanted to, useless and impotent to pass adequate laws regulating the relation of employer and employee and of union workmen and non-union workmen. To maintain and enforce this constitutional, governmental policy of laissez faire in the relations of employer and employee fastened on to the people and the legislature of this state by the Supreme Court of the state, the remedy of injunction with its summary fines and imprisonments was judicially extended to industrial disputes. The uselessness and impotency of the judicial remedy of injunction to maintain and enforce the judgemade constitutional governmental policy of laissez faire between employer and employee is patent to everybody. Now three, and perhaps four, judges of the Supreme Court of the state are willing to turn this judge-made laissez-faire governmental policy over to the laborunions, their officers and members, telling them to do as they please with non-union workmen under the name and guise of "peaceful persuasion," and telling non-union workmen they must bow to the "peaceful persuasion" of union workmen and join the union, or starve, so far as the existing law and courts of Illinois are concerned. This judge-made laissez-faire system of law and remedies, for the "protection" of the abstract "equal economic unit" called the workman, cannot stand; it is fundamentally wrong in point of law.1

1 For concise statement of the fallacies and elements of truth in the governmental policy of laissez faire advocated by the older political economists, see the first lecture in Arnold Toynbee's Industrial Revolution in England, published in 1887. In reading the discussions of laissez faire by economists and philosophers, it must ever be kept in mind that the life, liberty, and property clause is centuries older than laissez faire; and that under it and without disturbing it, and in harmony with it, many systems of political economy and philosophy and legislative policy have had their day and ceased to be. It does not stand for the imperishable value of the individual as an end in himself, but it permits diverse experimental means of preserving that end. The labor union may be one of them; I do not know, and as a lawyer do not care till the legislature says so.

TOPIC IV

RELIEF AGAINST PROCEEDINGS AT LAW

I. IRREGULARITY IN AN EXECUTION SALE AS A FOUNDATION OF EQUITY JURISDICTION IN ILLINOIS.

II. JURISDICTION TO SET ASIDE JUDGMENT IN PROCEEDINGS UNDER TULEY ACT COMMENT ON WEST CHICAGO PARK COMMISSIONERS V. RIDDLE.

I

IRREGULARITY IN AN EXECUTION SALE AS A FOUNDATION OF EQUITY

JURISDICTION IN ILLINOIS a

The rule that gross inadequacy of price in an execution sale of real estate cannot give a court of equity jurisdiction to set aside the sale, unless there is an irregularity in the execution proceedings, is stated often in opinions of the Supreme Court. And it is said, in substance, that any irregularity, even the least spark of an irregularity, may be enough to give a court of equity jurisdiction to set aside the sale, if the inadequacy of price is gross.1

The recent case of Skakel v. Cycle Trade Publishing Company, where $20,000 worth of land was sold on execution for $132.04, was presented to the Supreme Court on the basis of an accepted legal theory that made its decision turn on the single question whether the omission of the word "personal" before the word "property" in the copy of a constable's nulla bona return contained in the transcript of a justice's judgment filed in the circuit court as a basis for execution against real estate, was enough of an irregularity in the execution proceedings to give the court equity jurisdiction to set aside the

a[5 Ill. Law Rev., 203, November, 1910.]

1 Thomas v. Habenstreit, 68 Ill., 115, 118; Davis v. Chicago Dock Co., 129 Ill., 180, 188, 189; Hobson v. McCambridge, 130 Ill., 367, 378; Bullen v. Dawson, 139 Ill., 633, 642; Miller v. McAlister, 197 Ill., 72, 79; Skakel v. Cycle Trade Publishing Co., 237 Ill., 482; and see Graffam v.Burgess, 117 U. S., 180; Schroeder v. Young, 161 U. S., 334.

2 237 III., 482.

sale. The Supreme Court divided four to three. The majority thought the irregularity was not enough, and the debtor's bill was dismissed.3

That decision breaks the notion that any irregularity, however slight, in execution proceedings, is enoguh to give equity jurisdiction.

The law is, it is believed, that either (1) any irregularity in execution proceedings that makes the sale void, or (2) the irregularity of a sheriff's sale en masse, gives a court of equity jurisdiction to set aside the execution sale; and that equity jurisdiction cannot be founded on any other irregularity, however grossly inadequate the price may be. The reason why either one of these two irregularities may be enough of a foundation for equity jurisdiction to set aside is that a court of equity in Illinois has, after fixed stages in the execution proceedings, the jurisdiction that normally belongs to the court of law that rendered the judgment to supervise and control its execution.

Before the adoption by New York of the policy of allowing a debtor to redeem from an execution sale of real estate, the New York Court of Chancery, Kent, C., recognized the right or equity of a debtor to avoid an execution sale of his land, and entertained debtor's bills for relief from execution sales of land in Woods v. Monell 5 in 1815, in Howell v. Baker in 1819, and in Tiernan v. Wilson in 1822. And in 1796, in Lord Cranstown v. Johnston, the English Court of Chancery, Sir R. Pepper

6

3 The minority relied on other irregularities found in the abstract of the record, but I understand the transcript of the record removes them.

4 On the origin of execution sales of land in the United States, see 4 Kent's Com., 428-430.