The Green Bag
Volume XXIV
January, 1912
Number 1
John Henry Wigmore BY ALBERT KOCOUREK'
PRESIDENT LOWELL of Harvard, at his installation in 1908, in pre senting the subject of this sketch for the doctor's degree in law, as "author of a monumental treatise on the law of evidence, a jurist in a day when lawyers are many and jurists are rare," touched upon a thought of more than ordinary importance. We all understand that a lawyer is one learned in the application of the law, — that he has to do with legal dogma and its traditional interpreta tion; but what then is a jurist? Pre vailing newspaper usage, by the same process of overstatement which adds color to otherwise dull events, has made the office of the judge synonymous with the learning of the jurist. This euphe mistic corruption has not, however, been assimilated by our spoken language, and for the ordinary man the term jurist stands isolated and unused. The reason for this is not far to seek, and it has a characteristic relation to 'Albert Kocourek was born in 1875 at Louisville, Ky. He specialized in philosophy and meta physics at Lake Forest University, and graduated in the Law Department of the University of Michigan. He is lecturer on Analytical Juris prudence in Northwestern University; lecturer on the History of Legal Institutions in The John Marshall Law School, at Chicago; a member of the International Association of Philosophy of Law and Economics (Berlin); and a practitioner at the Chicago bar.
our system of law. Without pausing to enter into an historical statement of origins, we may roughly distinguish the jurist as one who is learned in the form of the law or the history of legal institutions. Thus, Austin was a jur ist, while Blackstone was a lawyer, unless his knowledge of the civil law brought him within the circle of jurists according to Continental usage. Austin understood and treated, in his remark able book, the abstract nature of law and its various organic parts; while Blackstone gave an institutional account of English laws. Again, Maine was a jurist, while Maitland was essentially a legal historian, although a very eminent one. Maine treated legal institutions from an abstract and philosophical foundation; while Maitland principally confined his efforts to concrete instances of a local legal development. It is not contended, of course, that the lines can be sharply drawn: but that is a matter of little importance, since the AngloAmerican system has produced so few names entitled to be classed among the jurists, that little if any confusion can result. Dr. Wigmore is at once a lawyer and a jurist. But beyond this he is one of the most striking and remarkable of
