Lucilius A. Emery, Retiring Chief Justice against and levied upon the goods and chattels of their inhabitants and that this would be “due process of law.”
505
state which has been made luminous by reason and conscience, and advanced
to its ends with calm deliberation and
Andrews v. King was a petition for cer
the dignity and strength of impartial
tiorari to quash the proceedings of the mayor and aldermen of Portland in re moving the city marshal from ofl‘ice. The nature, powers and duties of special
laws. He has been deeply impressed with the importance of the doctrine of stare decisis, as necessary to maintain the stability of the law and enable counsel
tribunals in such cases are fully consid
lors to advise with reasonable certainty
ered and it was held that a hearing by the aldermen alone, the mayor being required to sit on the hearing, was not
and men of affairs to act with a reason able sense of security. But he has been
sufiicient, even if no objection was made by the ofiicer. Warren v. Westbrook, in the eighty-sixth Maine, is a leading case upon the exercise of the equity powers
of the court in the apportionment of waters where there are two natural chan nels in a river caused by an island. In the subsequent opinions will be found luminous expositions of constitutional
a progressive jurist in the true sense of the term and has never hesitated to
recommend new legislation or adopt a new rule, which distinctly appeared to be an improvement either in substantive
law or methods of procedure. Change is ever going on in a ceaseless round. Be wildering discoveries and developments are constantly being madeinvolvingradi
law relating to interstate commerce, the
cal changes in nearly all departments of human activity. Conservative as the
police power of the state and other ques
law and the courts must necessarily be,
tions of fundamental and far-reaching
importance. In the opinion of the jus tices prepared by Chief Justice Emery in 1907, in answer to questions submitted by the Senate, this court, true to the
they are compelled to catch the spirit that animates the progress of society and to keep in sympathy with the advancing thought and progressive tendencies of the age. But it will not fail to come to
motto of the state, led all others, state
the younger generation, as it has to us
and federal, in promulgating the benefi cent doctrine of the conservation of our natural resources in the interests of the people. It is there held to be within the constitutional power of the Legislature to restrict or regulate the cutting of for
of the older, that the principles of simple truth and justice and the instinctive con ceptions of common right upon which, in
est trees on wild or uncultivated land by the owner thereof, without compensa
tion to such owner in order to prevent injurious droughts and freshets and pre serve the natural water supply of the state.
In all of these opinions his generous intellectual gifts, his vigorous original reasoning, the ripe fruits of his varied experience and his robust moral princi
ples have been employed to crystalize into judicial decrees the justice of the
the last analysis, the protection of human
rights and the redress of human wrongs must be founded, will remain the same from generation to generation, now and
forever. The public press outside of New Eng land continue their laments over the law's delay and the failure of justice in the criminal courts. But the reasons for these complaints have not existed in our state during Judge Ernery's service upon the bench. With all modesty we afi‘irm that in no other state in the Union has the substance of truth and right been
so rarely sacrificed to the science of state
