The Study of Legal Biography

painting lend themselves to this work, that a portrait painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, or Sir Thomas Lawrence, or

by Sir Peter Lely, or by Holbein, to get back into more ancient days, en

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question, until we reach a point in time and the place of discharge of legal force. A leading case becomes a part of the wondrous warp and woof which the

art of engraving in England, which por

judges are perpetually weaving into a fabric like the Egis for the protection of the liberties of ourselves and our

tray a man in his earliest years, through

distant posterity.

his successes at the bar, during his career

It is an astonishing thing how much we can learn simply from the exhibition of legal documents. We read about the conflict between Lord Coke and Lord Ellesmere, one the Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench and the other the Chan

graved by the very finest masters of the

as Solicitor, or Attorney-General, and

then after his promotion to the Com mon Pleas or to the King's Bench, and from there to the Woolsack, and that

at every stage of his career we can have a definite impression on the mind

cellor, upon the question of the right of

as to what he looked like, how he was robed, who his associates were, we are

the Chancellor to restrain in equity by injunction the execution of a judgment

instinctively led to inquire something as to the man himself and learn to

recovered at law and alleged to have been fraudulently obtained, and the

know him more vividly than merely through his decisions. If we pick up books like Foss’ Dictionary of the

conflict between Coke and Ellesmere

Judges of England, Roscoe's Lives of Eminent Lawyers, Townsend's Eminent

Judges, Story's Life of Story, Benjamin Robins Curtis’ Life by George Ticknor Curtis, we see the truth of this state

ment. Biography becomes an essential element in the mastery of a knowledge of our profession. The life of the law, after all, is but the life, in the aggregate,

of its various members. We are all familiar with the value of leading cases, not only as live storehouses of prin

became of vital importance in the estab

lishment of the superior jurisdiction of chancery; but I confess that my own appreciation of the matter was very much intensified when in the course of a collection of autograph documents I finally secured a document upon which

the signatures of Lords Ellesmere and Coke stood side by side. When I sup plemented that by the collection of their portraits, when I attempted to gather around them the figures, the small simulacra of their associates, then I was

or for woe. But behind every case stands a judge, and behind every judge stands an occasion, and behind the occa

impelled to read the history of the times to see what manner of men they were, and what their real contribution to jurisprudence was. I felt that there was a principle at the basis of all this by which, if the study were intelligently

sion necessarily stands the century that

conducted, there could be found some

produced it, because these things are not accidental; and, we, in analyzing

method of appraisement—which is of great importance — of the value of judi cial judgments.

ciples, but as engines of energy for the affecting of the future whether for weal

the decisions in a leading case, are necessarily analyzing the brain of the

judge who pronounced that decision, his ancestral environment, his oppor

We have had thousands of judges in all parts of the country, even in the short time we have existed as a republic.

tunities of contact with this or that

There have been about sixteen hundred