Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/166

Columbia College Law School. such students as chose to hear him. That great jurist was compelled, under the consti tution of the State as it then existed, to retire from the high judicial office upon which he shed such enduring lustre at the compara tively early age of sixty. He was then in the full maturity of his powers. It is unques tionable that the State, by rejecting his services at the time when they were most

valuable, sustained a most serious check to what may be fitly called the classical development of its jurisprudence; for Kent was truly manysided. He was a fine classical scholar, a great student, a most persuasive and lucid writer, accustomed to broad lines of thought, in character most ad mirable, and wholly unaffected and genu ine in manners, as befitted a man of emi nent ability. He held judicial office for more than twenty-five years (from 1797 to 1823). His fitness for the po sition of Professor of JAMES Law had long been observed by the Trus tees of the College; for they offered him the post in 1793, while he was at the bar, and again thirty years later, in 1823, when he retired from the bench. His reasons for acceptance are well and somewhat pathetically given in the preface to the first volume of the first edi tion of his Commentaries. He says: "This renewed mark (in 1823) of the approbation of the Trustees of the College determined me to employ the entire leisure in which I found myself in further endeavors to discharge the debt which, according to Lord Bacon, every man owes to his profession. I was strongly

143

induced to accept the trust from want of occupation, being apprehensive that the sud den cessation of my habitual employment, and the contrast between the discussions of the forum and the solitude of retirement might be unpropitious to my health and spirits, and cast a premature shade over the happiness of declining years." Fortunate was he in the fact that the day of his retire ment from the bench was the commence ment of the brilliant career as a legal author for which he will be chiefly and most fa vorably remembered. The lectures of Chancellor Kent in the course of four years had developed into the first two vol umes of his Commen taries, the second vol ume being published November, 1827. Kent did not, how ever, succeed in estab lishing a law school or department in the College. He may not have made the effort'. His course of lectures was personal to him KENT self, and he left no successor. Some of his lectures have not been published, not from want of merit, but because they did not apparently form a part of a complete system. His Commentaries as they stand are imperfect as Commentaries on American Law, since they do not include torts, crimi nal law, administrative law, or procedure. There is evidence that his plan embraced at least some of these topics. As far as can be now ascertained, he simply read lec tures to his hearers. He held no examina tions, had no regular course of study, and held no moot courts. No degrees were con