James Brown Scott thought. He is undoubtedly today the most prominent American advocate of a judicial system which will insure equal justice to all nations, both great and small. He has worked out the problem and formulated a plan, and to secure its acceptance by the world he has been and is devoting his energies; and in doing this he is laboring in the most practical way in the cause of universal peace. Mr. Scott is peculiarly fitted by his talents and training for the task which he has undertaken. He is of American parentage, and was born in 1866 in a village of the Province of Ontario; his family shortly after his birth returned to Philadelphia, where he prepared for college and entered Harvard University, graduating from that institution in 1890. The following year Harvard conferred upon him the degree of Master of Arts, and he was granted the Parker fellow ship, under which he spent three years at Berlin, Heidelberg, and Paris, per fecting his education in the study of international law, which he had selected as a specialty, and obtaining a speaking knowledge of German and French. Returning to the United States Mr. Scott was admitted to the bar and took up his residence at Los Angeles, where in 1896 he organized the Los Angeles Law School (which later became the Law Department of the University of South ern California) and for three years con tinued as dean of that school. In 1899 he was offered and accepted the deanship of the College of Law of the University of Illinois, and remained there until 1903, when he became a professor in the Columbia Law School. In 1906 Mr. Scott was appointed the Solicitor of the Department of State, but continued his services in the edu cational field by filling the chair of international law at George Washington
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University and that of lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. In 1911 he severed his connection with the Government to accept the secretaryship of the Car negie Endowment for International Peace, of which the founder had named him a trustee. While connected with the University of Illinois Mr. Scott continued his special line of study and published his "Cases on International Law," a collection carefully compiled and classified which has become a standard in the United States. In 1906 he entered upon a more valuable service in the literary field in becoming the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of International Law, the quarterly of the American Society of International Law, an organization of which Mr. Scott was one of the founders, and which has been most successful during its six years of existence, a success due in large measure to the Journal, which from the first ranked very high among the periodicals devoted to the subject of international law. The excellence of this publication must be credited chiefly to the ability, the labor, and the world-wide acquaintance of its editorin-chief. The year following the first issuance of the Journal Mr. Scott was appointed a technical delegate for the United States to the Second Peace Conference at The Hague. His services in that capacity and later as the critical his torian of the proceedings have given him a prominent place internationally. Possessing an extensive acquaintance with all the leading works upon inter national law and with many of the dis tinguished jurists and diplomats who were members of the Conference, with a memory exceptionally retentive, with a natural gift for clearness of expression and a fluency of address in English
