The Study of Legal Biography

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order to run the state of Delaware.

simply talk to you without a single

Well, after awhile the doctors began to fall to the rear and the lawyers forged ahead so that-I don't know how it is here — but in other parts of the

note, upon a subject which has been

country there is a general impression

terrified by the sight of the “chiel” in front of me taking notes. Your President has said that I would say something about the value and the interest of the study of legal biography as an aid to legal education, and to that topic I shall confine myself.

that the gentle art of bleeding has passed from the medical to the legal profession. I think it was Lord Stowell who once said, in answer to an objector who gave

vent to some expressions of opposition to public dining for parish or other purposes, “Sir: I believe in public din ing; it brings people together. It causes men to agree who might otherwise dis pute; besides, it lubricates business."Lord Stowell, as we know, was of a convivial disposition, as also was his brother, the famous Lord Chancellor Eldon, and

neither of them was above a bottle of port. We all know that the ability to dine

familiar to my thoughts but which I have never in any way attempted to put into type, although I am somewhat

ingThere it, and are when several I sayways the study of approach of legal biography I do not mean that accidental passing of time which very many of us indulge in, in our otherwise unoccupied

hours at night, by picking up a charm ing volume of legal biography and simply turning the pages to find out when the

once a term, for twelve consecutive

man was born, and what he did, and how he came to the bar, and how, in

terms, in the great Hall of the Middle Temple, was once regarded as an ample proof of the fitness of one to come to the

vated all the bystanders and the juries and astounded them by the extent of

the first month of his practice, he capti

bar, to be called to the bench of the Inn. Mr. Walker, an English barrister whose

his learning and eloquence and how, in

dinners were the most successful in his

to amass, as Thomas Jefferson is said

day and generation, in London, has

to have done, a sum very much larger

the course of three years, he was able

given us a little book on the art of din

than most of us are able to do at the

ing.

end of fifteen or twenty years, as is the manner of ordinary legal biographies, but I mean, gentlemen, something more

With some knowledge of the habits

and the exercises in other state bar associations, it seems to me that you, gentlemen of Rhode Island, have rather

improved upon the practice.

Instead

of having formal essays read at a morn ing session of the State Bar Association,

to be followed by a banquet for the sur vivors some two nights later, you hap pily combine the two functions, and postpone disaster.

My friend Mr. Eaton having thrown

serious and much more scientific and systematic than that. The principle lying at the foundation of any interest in legal biography can be best illustrated by this simple thought. We all know that if we visit the city of Washington and go into the Supreme

Court of the United States and see the nine Justices upon the bench, we ask

and heavy about the discourse, I con

their names, and notice the exact order in which they are arranged to the right and left of the Chief Justice, and, if we are there on a Monday when opinions

cluded that I would come here and

are handed down, we listen intently to

out a caution that if I came here under the idea that I was to read a formal

paper there might be something sodden