The Study of Legal Biography
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order to run the state of Delaware. Well, after awhile the doctors began to fall to the rear and the lawyers forged ahead so that — I don't know how it is here — but in other parts of the country there is a general impression that the gentle art of bleeding has passed from the medical to the legal profession.
I think it was Lord Stowell who once said, in answer to an objector who gave vent to some expressions of opposition to public dining for parish or other purposes, "Sir: I believe in public dining; it brings people together. It causes men to agree who might otherwise dispute; besides, it lubricates business." Lord Stowell, as we know, was of a convivial disposition, as also was his brother, the famous Lord Chancellor Eldon, and neither of them was above a bottle of port.
We all know that the ability to dine once a term, for twelve consecutive terms, in the great Hall of the Middle Temple, was once regarded as an ample proof of the fitness of one to come to the bar, to be called to the bench of the Inn. Mr. Walker, an English barrister whose dinners were the most successful in his day and generation, in London, has given us a little book on the art of dining. With some knowledge of the habits and the exercises in other state bar associations, it seems to me that you, gentlemen of Rhode Island, have rather improved upon the practice. Instead of having formal essays read at a morning session of the State Bar Association, to be followed by a banquet for the survivors some two nights later, you happily combine the two functions, and postpone disaster.
My friend Mr. Eaton having thrown out a caution that if I came here under the idea that I was to read a formal paper there might be something sodden and heavy about the discourse, I concluded that I would come here and
simply talk to you without a single note, upon a subject which has been familiar to my thoughts but which I have never in any way attempted to put into type, although I am somewhat terrified by the sight of the “chiel” in front of me taking notes.
Your President has said that I would say something about the value and the interest of the study of legal biography as an aid to legal education, and to that topic I shall confine myself.
There are several ways of approaching it, and when I say the study of legal biography I do not mean that accidental passing of time which very many of us indulge in, in our otherwise unoccupied hours at night, by picking up a charming volume of legal biography and simply turning the pages to find out when the man was born, and what he did, and how he came to the bar, and how, in the first month of his practice, he captivated all the bystanders and the juries and astounded them by the extent of his learning and eloquence and how, in the course of three years, he was able to amass, as Thomas Jefferson is said to have done, a sum very much larger than most of us are able to do at the end of fifteen or twenty years, as is the manner of ordinary legal biographies, but I mean, gentlemen, something more serious and much more scientific and systematic than that.
The principle lying at the foundation of any interest in legal biography can be best illustrated by this simple thought. We all know that if we visit the city of Washington and go into the Supreme Court of the United States and see the nine Justices upon the bench, we ask their names, and notice the exact order in which they are arranged to the right and left of the Chief Justice, and, if we are there on a Monday when opinions are handed down, we listen intently to
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