VOL. XVI.
No. 4.
BOSTON.
APRIL, 1904.
ROBERT COOPER CRIER. By FRANCIS R. JONES, Of the Boston Bar. THE material for an exposition of the life of Mr. Justice Grier is even more meagre than is customary in the case of great judges. Two wholly inadequate notices appeared during his lifetime. One was in Biographi cal Sketches of Eminent American Lawyers, edited by John Livingston of the Xew York Bar and printed in 1852. The other was in Tiie Forum, by David Paul Brown of the Philadelphia Bar, printed in 1856. And there have been divers brief, even attenuated allusions to his life and work in various magazines. These are practically all that there are, except his published opinions, out of which to construct a biography. The proceedings of the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States upon his retire ment furnish no further data. If there were other proceedings after his death nine months later, Mr. Wallace did not print them in the reports. The present writer, therefore, is assured of the necessarily inade quate character of this sketch, especially as from the nature of the biographical articles in this magazine, he is debarred from going into a discussion of the cases which are at once Mr. Justice Grier's monument and his life. As has been noted before in this series of papers, the seclusion of the scholar and of the judge presents no aspect of dramatic in terest. It is a life of daily and uneventful toil, consecrated to a great public duty and to one of the greatest of the sciences. But
unlike natural science, jurisprudence holds within its domain no possibility for any great or startling discovery, that awakens and as tonishes the imagination and admiration of men. No doubt its steady pursuit conduces to the public weal no less benignly. But that pursuit is not amenable to popular notoriety. Its achievements are those of the closet, where the ancient lamp of learning burns steadily. Its paths are through forest glades, along blazed trails. Only once or so, in a century, has it been given to some master mind to strike out a new path,—to be a pioneer. And that opportunity is to be compelled by no one. It comes unsought and unheralded, almost uncontrolled. Yet it is one of the glories of the judicial history of our race that whenever it has come, there has been a man capable of meeting it; of taking it up and making it at first peculiarly his own and then of handing his achievement down to coming generations as a great and price less legacy. Of such as these the names of Sir Edward Coke, Lord Holt, Lord Hardwicke. Lord Mansfield, Lord Stowell, and our own great Marshall leap to the front. And after them throng an innumerable list of great jurists, who lacked only the oppor tunity to win a place beside those still greater ones. If Mr. Justice Grier was not one of those who could have grasped such an op portunity and risen to such heights, he was at the very least a very sound lawyer and a very great judge, who for nearly a quarter of
