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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
The commendation of Mr. Hamlin's book Legal Education in Colonial New York in the foreword by Emeritus Professor Beale should ensure for it a warm welcome by the Cambridge Law Faculty, apart from the interest which its subject merits on the part of a body of teachers.
1 Published in 1939 by the New York University Law Quarterly Eeview, Washington Square Bast, New York. Mr. Eamlin is Director of Eesearch in Colonial Laws and Institutions in the New York University School of Law.
2 Joseph Henry Beale, Junior, some time Eoyall Professor of Law in the University of Harvard, for many years the leading authority on the Conflict of Laws, lectured in Cambridge in 1921 as the guest of the Law School, and received from the University the Honorary Degree of LL.D. He has done as much as any American scholar of his generation to stimulate an interest in legal history in the United States.
3 With the small exception that one Thomas Johnson, a lawyer, served asjudge for one year.
4 There is in the library of the Law School of Columbia University a large manuscript Abridgement of the Law by Mompesson. P. 85.
5 P. 206.
6 In 1788 he became Governor of New Jersey, and held this office till his death in 1746. He was the father of Lewis Morris, Junior, (judge of the Vice-Admiralty Court), and grandfather of G-ouverneur Morris, the Eevolution statesman. Pp. 79, 89.
7 P. 206.
8 P. 79.
9 P. v.
10 Some Governors were reluctant to undertake judicial work and delayed taking the oath of chancellor unless ordered from England to hold Courts. P. 111.
11 He was a son of the famous Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury. P. 112.
12 P. 112
13 The total number of lawyers who practised in the Courts of New York during this period was over four hundred. P. 115.
14 P. 81, n. 26.
15 See the passage quoted on p. 15 from Dr. Blake Odgers’ article in A Century of Law Reform, pp. 32–3.
16 E. A. Jones, American Members of the Inns of Court, published 1924. Six men were members of more than one Inn.
17 In addition to the seventeen referred to, there are eleven who joined Inns giving New York as their residence, but cannot be traced as having practised in New York.
18 P. 19.
19 The case of Andrew Hamilton is interesting in this connexion. He was born circ. 1656. While visiting England in 1713 he was admitted to Gray's Inn on January 27, 1713–4. Two weeks later he was called to the bar ‘per favor’. P. 32.
20 Pp. 21–2, quoting from ‘William Alexander Papers’. Twenty-three members of the prominent New York family of Livingston were lawyers between 1686 and 1786. Robert Livingston, Junior, b. 1688, was the first New Yorker to join an Inn.
21 P. 34, quoting the 1902 edition of ‘Carroll Letters’ by T. M. Field.
22 P. 36.
23 P. 36.
24 E.g. on October 24, 1771, the Supreme Court ordered: ‘That Mr Attorney General, Mr. Hicks, Mr. Duane, and Mr. Samuel Jones do attend this afternoon at six o'clock at the house of Richard Bolton in the Broad Way, in order to examine the Gentlemen who have made applications for Lycenses to practice in this Court, and that said Examination be held in the presence of such of the Judges of this Court as shall attend.’ P. 50.
25 P. 41.
26 Quoted in full pp. 167–170.
27 P. 43. Van Schaack had recently worked in the office of the very learned William Smith, Junior, whose advice to students is referred to later. It does not appear whether Van Schaack intended to include Smith in his general indictment.
28 See the passage quoted below from John Adams’ Diary.
29 I am indebted to Mr. Hodgkinson, Librarian of Lincoln's Inn, for bringing this point to my notice.
30 The D. N. B. gives a full account of Thomas Wood, 1661—1722, scholar of Winchester and Fellow of New College. He was a classical scholar as well as a lawyer, and in middle life took Orders. Sir William Holdsworth (H. B. L. xii, 419) gives some account of his ‘Institute of the Laws of England’, stating 1722 as the date of the first edition, while the D. N. B. states 1720. Among Wood's other writings were an ‘Institute of the Civil Law’, 1704, and a ‘Treatise on the First Principles of Law in General, out of French’, 1705.
31 Apparently 1781–83, but the figure 1778 appears against his name on p. 206.
32 He wrote a history of New York and numerous articles on political subjects.
33 Printed, pp. 197–200, from his Commonplace Book in the New York Public Library.
34 May I, in all humility, say that I have often ineffectually urged this view upon my colleagues.
35 The Chief Sources of English Legal History, p. 243.
36 H. B. L. xii, 168–9.
37 Pp. 189–190. There is a detailed account of Ballow's book in Holdsworth, H. E. L. xii, 191–2, 222–37.
38 P. 62.
39 The passage is quoted in full on p. 107.
40 P. 27.
41 English Law and the Eenaissance, 32.
42 Mr. Hamlin says that the only law books printed in America before 1771 were the laws of colonial assemblies, the records of some outstanding trials, and the texts of certain legal opinions and arguments. P. 71.
43 In 1779 a chair of law was founded at William and Mary College in Virginia. In the same year Isaac Eoyall of Massachusetts, then resident in London, made his will giving property to Harvard College for establishing a professorship of law. Thayer, H. L. E. ix, 171. The Eoyall Professorship was actually founded in 1815 : its distinction has been enhanced by the tenures of John Chipman Gray and Joseph Henry Beale.
44 A photograph of this part of the catalogue is reproduced between pp. 76 and 77.
46 Mr. Hamlin gives us the interesting information that most of the well-to-do lawyers of New York remained loyal to the mother country, and that not half-adozen of them remained in practice after the war. The banished loyalists took such of their books as had survived the struggle to England, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick or Canada. P. 90.
46 Its interest is enhanced by portraits of six of the lawyers of whom it treats, and by a number of facsimiles. And it is admirably indexed.