The Cornell Law Quarterly PDF Download

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Book Reviews Richard H. Brown, Editor-in-Charge. Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, 1830-1860. By Frederic Hathaway Chase. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1918. pp. vi, 33o. Justice Holmes in his Common Law says of Chief Justice Shaw, the strength of that great judge lay in an accurate appreciation of the requirements of the community whose officer he was. Some, indeed many, English judges could be named who have surpassed him in accurate technical knowledge, but few have lived who were his equals in their understanding of the grounds of public policy to which all laws must ultimately be referred. It was this which made him, in the language of the late Judge Curtis, the greatest magistrate which this country has produced. Daniel Webster said of him that he was unsurpassed in everything that constitutes an upright, learned and intelligent judge; there is not in the world a more upright, conscientious judge than Chief Justice Shaw. Rufus Choate remarked on one occasion, When you consider for how many years and with what strength and wisdom he has administered the law, ?how steady he has kept everything, ?how much we owe to his strength of character, ?I confess I regard him as the Indian does his wooden log curiously carved; I acknowledge he is ugly but I bow before a superior intelligence. Senator Hoar testifies that throughout Massachusetts the Chief Justice was venerated as if he were a demi-god, and in his native county as a god. It is strange that that one to whom such homage was paid by his eminent contemporaries and who won so exalted a place in the history of a great commonwealth should have waited nearly sixty years for recognition of his fame by an adequate biography. Lemuel Shaw was born in Barn