MR. JUSTICE BROWN ican vessel while in a port of Ontario had been libeled by material men who had fur nished supplies to her at her home port in Ohio and for which they claimed a lien under the law of that state. The Ontario court declined to enforce the lien for want of jurisdiction, but in the meanwhile sea men filed libels for wages and in their ac tions the vessel was condemned and sold, after which she was registered in the cus tom house in Toronto. Subsequently the vessel was seized in the Eastern District of Michigan by the material men and the owner under the judicial sale in Ontario set up his claim. Judge Brown held that the judicial sale of the vessel under the claims of the seamen of which the court had juris diction extinguished all the liens upon her and vested an indefeasible title, clear of liens, in the hands of the purchaser. He based his decision on the fact that this was the law in all or in almost all, of the civil ized nations of the world, and that to permit the prior lien holders to enforce their liens after such a Kale would result in rendering it impossible for judicial sales in rent to be conducted as no one could purchase at guch a sale unless perfect title, good the world over, could be obtained. The material men were relegated to whatever remedies they might have as against the surplus money at the place of sale. Judge Brown's judicial duties were by no means confined to the decision of admiralty cases but extended over the whole range of Federal jurisdiction. In United States v. Clark, 31 Fed. Rep. 710. he delivered an opinion which was commented on in the press, reviewed in several of the law jour nals, and incorporated into one of the Har vard law text-books, and also made the basis of a military order. Clark, a sergeant in a United States regiment, had shot a private who while confined under a con viction for some offense by a court-martial had attempted to escape. A court of in quiry acquitted him of all blame but he was taken before Judge Brown as a com
mitting magistrate, charged with murder by the district attorney and there pleaded the finding of the Court of Inquiry and also that he was acting in the discharge of his duty. Judge Brown took jurisdiction holding that the finding of the Court of Inquiry, while entitled to weight as an expression of the views of the military court as to the necessity of using the musket to prevent the escape, was not a bar to a legal prose cution. He held that a homicide com mitted by a military guard without malice and in the performance of his military duties is excusable unless the act is so far beyond the scope of his authority or is such that a man of ordinary sense and under standing would know that it was illegal; that the sergeant had the right to shoot a military convict attempting to escape, if there was no other possible means of pre venting his escape, and that the common law distinction between felonies and mis demeanors has no application to military offenses. In conclusion he found that as Clark pnly did what he conceived to be his duty, and there was an entire absence of malice, he should be discharged. When Justice Brown took his seat on the Supreme Court Bench, the Second Cir cuit was represented by Justice Blatchford, who, in his previous capacities of district judge of the Southern District of New York and circuit judge of the Second Circuit, had had a large experience as an admiralty judge. Justice Blatchford died in 1893, and while other members of the court also wrote opinions in those cases after that event most of the opinions in admiralty were delivered by Justice Brown. Prior to the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1891, making the judgments of the Cir cuit Courts of Appeals final in admiralty cases, there was an appeal as a matter of right in these cases, but since the passage of that act these cases are only reviewed in the Supreme Court when petitions for writ of ccrtiorari, provided for in the act, are
