The Study of Legal Biography
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painting lend themselves to this work, that a portrait painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, or Sir Thomas Lawrence, or by Sir Peter Lely, or by Holbein, to get back into more ancient days, engraved by the very finest masters of the art of engraving in England, which portray a man in his earliest years, through his successes at the bar, during his career as Solicitor, or Attorney-General, and then after his promotion to the Common Pleas or to the King's Bench, and from there to the Woolsack, and that at every stage of his career we can have a definite impression on the mind as to what he looked like, how he was robed, who his associates were, we are instinctively led to inquire something as to the man himself and learn to know him more vividly than merely through his decisions. If we pick up books like Foss' Dictionary of the Judges of England, Roscoe's Lives of Eminent Lawyers, Townsend's Eminent Judges, Story's Life of Story, Benjamin Robins Curtis' Life by George Ticknor Curtis, we see the truth of this statement. Biography becomes an essential element in the mastery of a knowledge of our profession. The life of the law, after all, is but the life, in the aggregate, of its various members. We are all familiar with the value of leading cases, not only as live storehouses of principles, but as engines of energy for the affecting of the future whether for weal or for woe. But behind every case stands a judge, and behind every judge stands an occasion, and behind the occasion necessarily stands the century that produced it, because these things are not accidental; and, we, in analyzing the decisions in a leading case, are necessarily analyzing the brain of the judge who pronounced that decision, his ancestral environment, his opportunities of contact with this or that
question, until we reach a point in time and the place of discharge of legal force. A leading case becomes a part of the wondrous warp and woof which the judges are perpetually weaving into a fabric like the Egis for the protection of the liberties of ourselves and our distant posterity.
It is an astonishing thing how much we can learn simply from the exhibition of legal documents. We read about the conflict between Lord Coke and Lord Ellesmere, one the Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench and the other the Chancellor, upon the question of the right of the Chancellor to restrain in equity by injunction the execution of a judgment recovered at law and alleged to have been fraudulently obtained, and the conflict between Coke and Ellesmere became of vital importance in the establishment of the superior jurisdiction of chancery; but I confess that my own appreciation of the matter was very much intensified when in the course of a collection of autograph documents I finally secured a document upon which the signatures of Lords Ellesmere and Coke stood side by side. When I supplemented that by the collection of their portraits, when I attempted to gather around them the figures, the small simulacra of their associates, then I was impelled to read the history of the times to see what manner of men they were, and what their real contribution to jurisprudence was. I felt that there was a principle at the basis of all this by which, if the study were intelligently conducted, there could be found some method of appraisement—which is of great importance — of the value of judicial judgments.
We have had thousands of judges in all parts of the country, even in the short time we have existed as a republic. There have been about sixteen hundred
