|The Green Bag.|}}
Vol. I. No. 12.
BOSTON.
December, 1889.
IRVING BROWNE.
No name in the legal profession is, probably, better known, both here and abroad, than that of Irving Browne, the editor of the " Albany Law Journal."
Mr. Browne was born at Marshall, Oneida Co., N. Y., in September, 1835. His early education was received in the common schools and academies at Nashua, N. H., and Norwich, Conn., where his father resided during young Browne's boyhood. At the age of fourteen he began to study printing and telegraphy, in both of which he speedily became an expert. He was one of the first operators who habitually read by sound, and in the spring of 1853 was employed in a telegraph office in Boston. He remained but a short time in this position, however, and later in the same year entered the law office of Theodore Miller at Hudson, N. Y., and began to fit himself for the bar. After three years in the office, Mr. Browne entered the Albany Law School, from which he was graduated in the spring of 1857 and admitted to practice. Shortly after his graduation he formed a partnership in Troy, N. Y., with Rufus M. and Martin I. Townsend, under the firm-name of Townsends & Browne, which continued until 1878, when the firm was dissolved and Mr. Browne continued the practice of the law alone until the fall of 1879.
At the bar Mr. Browne was, during the last years of his residence at Troy, a favorite referee. He was best known by his arguments before the appellate courts. The chief of these, perhaps, was that in Meneely v. Meneely, 62 N. Y. 427; s. C. 20 Am. Rep. 489, in which he established the right of a man to the fair use of his family name in the same kind of business pursued by his brothers who claimed a monopoly of the name in that business by gift of the business and good-will from the father. Of this argument it has been said that " it has become standard authority, and is used as a text for citation by the whole legal profession."
In Corcoran v. Holbrook, 59 N. Y. 517; s. C. 17 Am. Rep. 359, Mr. Browne struggled unsuccessfully against the application of the doctrine of alter ego to the case of an individual employer. This is probably the leading case on the precise point in this country, and is opposed to the English doctrine. In Cowce v. Cornell, 79 N. Y. 91; s. C. 3 1 Am. Rep. 428, he succeeded in preventing the application of the doctrine of constructive fraud as between grandfather and grandson. The case also involved an interesting and novel question of alteration of a note by removal of a stub. In Organ v. Stewart, 60 N. Y. 413, Mr. Browne was unsuccessful in an endeavor to persuade the court to adopt the Massachusetts doctrine which allows a parol modification of an agreement for the sale of goods invalid under the Statute of Frauds.
But it is as a writer and journalist that Mr. Browne is best known to the profession, and he has at different times made valuable contributions to legal literature, prominent among which are : " Short Studies of Great Lawyers," " Humorous Phases of the Law," "Law and Lawyers in Literature/' the " Judicial Interpretation of Common Words and Phrases," and the " Law of Domestic Relations." He has also written a sketch of the67
