James Kent was an American jurist and legal commentator. He served as a Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court from 1804 to 1814 and as a Chancellor of New York from 1814 to 1823.
Education
Kent was prepared by private tutors and in schools at Norwalk, Pawling, and Danbury, to enter Yale College in September 1777, where he received his degree of Bachelor of Arts on September 12, 1781. His college course was several times interrupted by the events of the Revolutionary War. During one of these intervals, while living in the country, he came across a copy of Blackstone's Commentaries. He read the four volumes which, he said, "inspired me, at the age of fifteen, with awe, and I fondly determined to be a lawyer. " In November 1781, he began a three years' legal apprenticeship in the law office of Attorney-General Egbert Benson, at Poughkeepsie. At the age of twenty-one, in January 1785, he was admitted to the New York supreme court bar.
Career
In April 1785, Kent entered into a law partnership with Gilbert Livingston, which continued until April 1793, when he moved to New York City. His years in Poughkeepsie were not overburdened with legal practice, but the use to which his leisure was put had a great influence on his life. His political affiliations were fixed by association with Federalist leaders who came to Poughkeepsie to attend the constitutional convention of 1788, and particularly by admiration for Alexander Hamilton, who was already a national figure. He supported Jay in the contested gubernatorial election awarded to Clinton and thus aroused the opposition of the adherents of the latter, among whom was his brother-in-law, Theodorus Bailey. In 1793 he ran for Congress but was defeated by Bailey. This political check, and the unpleasant personal relations which were incident to it, determined him to move to New York. The rest of his political career may be briefly sketched. He was three times elected to the New York Assembly, but his political influence was thereafter exerted as an incident to judicial office. His appointment to the New York supreme court, and afterward to the chancellorship, made him ex officio a member of the council of revision charged with examining bills from the legislature and vetoing them at discretion. His stout conservatism made him enemies, while other members were accused of political bias. As a consequence, in the constitutional convention of 1821, the Democratic majority abolished the council.
When Kent moved to New York, he owned real property worth ú 200, had ú 100 in cash, and possessed a small library. Legal business did not come to him and for a time he was in financial straits. Through the influence of prominent Federalist friends, he was appointed professor of law in Columbia College. The appointment was dated December 24, 1793, and his first course of twenty-six lectures was delivered from November 17, 1794, to February 27, 1795, two a week, to "seven students and thirty-six gentlemen, chiefly lawyers and law students who did not belong to the college. " His subsequent courses did not attract students. Beginning in November 1795, he read, in his office, thirty-one lectures to two students and a few law clerks. The announcement of his third course attracted no students; and after the conclusion of his lectures to six students in the winter of 1797-1798, he presented his resignation to take effect in April. This was the end of the first professorship in law in Columbia University.
In the meantime, Kent had been active in state politics and had been thrice honored by Governor Jay. In February 1796 the latter gave him the lucrative appointment of master in Chancery, an office which he retained after he became recorder of the City of New York in March 1797. These two offices he resigned on his appointment, on February 6, 1798, to be a judge of the New York supreme court. He moved to Poughkeepsie, but after one year, took up a residence in Albany which lasted twenty-four years. In 1804 he became chief judge of the court, and on February 24, 1814, he was appointed chancellor of the New York court of Chancery.
The record of Kent's achievement as a judicial officer is to be found in three sets of law reports: Johnson's Cases Argued and Determined in the Court for the Trial of Impeachments and the Correction of Errors, 1799-1803 (3 vols. ) , his Report of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature and in the Court for Trial of Impeachments and the Correction of Errors, February 1806-February 1823 (20 vols. ), and his Cases of the State Court of Chancery, March 1814-July 1823 (7 vols). As chief justice, he appointed William Johnson official reporter under the act of 1804. In 1814 Johnson followed Kent to the court of Chancery. It was the fortunate association of these two men through a period of twenty-five years.
Before Kent became chancellor, the court of Chancery had had no great influence. He was therefore loath to accept the appointment, but afterward he found in it his greatest judicial opportunity. "I took the court, " he wrote, "as if it had been a new institution, and never before known in the United States. I had nothing to guide me, and was left at liberty to assume all such English Chancery powers and jurisdiction as I thought applicable under our Constitution. This gave me grand scope, and I was checked only by the revision of the Senate, or Court of Errors". He thus became practically the creator of equity jurisdiction in the United States. When English law and legal institutions were regarded with distrust, he preserved their best features and by his own personal conduct set an example of dignity and intellectual eminence, dominated by a high sense of judicial responsibility. The constitutional convention of 1821 had provided that judges should be retired on reaching the age of sixty. This brought Kent's judicial career to a close on July 31, 1823, "in the full meridian" of his faculties and fame, while yet in perfect mental and bodily health.
He resented this enforced retirement and moved to New York City on October 29, 1823, with no other prospect than that of writing opinions as chamber counsel. In the following month, however, he was offered and accepted a reappointment to the law professorship in Columbia College, which had remained vacant since his resignation in 1798. His introductory lecture, delivered February 2, 1824, in the College Hall, was published by the trustees. Two of the courses of lectures which followed, from February 6, 1824, to May 18, 1825, were attended by more auditors than students. The third course, from October 1825 to April 22, 1826, was taken by thirteen students and no auditors. The largest number of lectures given in a single course was fifty. Kent disliked both the preparation and the delivery of lectures. "They give me a good deal of trouble and anxiety, " he wrote. "I am compelled to study and write all the time, as if I was under the whip and spur. " "Having got heartily tired of lecturing, I abandoned it. " Thus came to an end, without enthusiasm or conspicuous success, Kent's second essay as law teacher.
The lectures were not prepared with a view to publication, and except for the urgent solicitation of his son William, nothing more would have been done with them. On so slight a chance hung the preparation of his Commentaries on American Law, a work on which his permanent reputation rests no less firmly than on his judicial decisions. In the two occupations of legal writer and of judge he found an opportunity friendly to his genius. In both he devoted himself, under little pressure, to the dignified development and exposition of the law, with results which he could not produce through teaching. At the age of sixty-three, he began the rewriting, expansion, and extension of his lectures for the purpose of publication. Volume I was published in 1826, at his own expense, at a cost, in sheets, of $1, 076. 27. The original plan was to complete the work in two volumes, but the preface to Volume II, published in 1827, promised a third volume. When this volume appeared in 1828, it announced that a fourth volume would be devoted to the doctrine of real estates. This volume was written with difficulty. The "subjects are very abstruse and perplexing, " he wrote in January 1830, "and I move very slowly and warily through the mazes of contingent remainders, executory devises, uses, trusts, and powers, and the modifications which they have received by our Revised Statutes". The volume, published in 1830, contained a dedication of the complete work to William Johnson. By December 1830, every complete set of the Commentaries had been sold, and Kent began the preparation of a second edition. This edition of 1832 was followed by the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth editions, in 1836, 1840, 1844, and 1848 respectively, all prepared by him. Eight editions were issued after his death. Part I, of Volume I, on International Law, was twice separately printed, in 1866 and in 1878, edited by John T. Abdy; and Part II of the same volume, on the Constitution of the United States, was translated into German, and into Spanish. The portion on Commercial and Maritime Law was published in Edinburgh in 1837.
The treatise on International Law was the first general American work on that subject, being ten years earlier than Wheaton's Elements of International Law. The fact that Kent based his discussion on the decisions of American and English courts, made his work, says Chamberlain, "superior to any previous treatise on this subject, and a landmark in the history of international law. " His greatest contribution was in his treatment of the subject of neutral commerce in time of war. His greatest contribution was in his treatment of the subject of neutral commerce in time of war. The treatise on the United States Constitution possessed less novelty, but Powell notes that one who "desires a brief review of the foundation stones of our constitutional jurisprudence can go nowhere else with such profit and pleasure as to this second part of the Commentaries. " "In his constitutional principles, " says the same writer, "he foreshadowed Marshall, and his opinions are worthy of a place beside those of the great Chief Justice. "
The whole work is in six parts devoted respectively (1) to the law of nations, (2) to the government and constitutional jurisprudence of the United States, (3) to the sources of the municipal law of the several states, (4) to the rights of persons, (5) to personal property, and (6) to real property. He had no American model for his work, and he did not copy Blackstone. His entire first volume has no counterpart in the English Commentaries, and he omitted separate treatment of the law of crimes, which is the subject of Blackstone's fourth volume. Strangely enough for one who made his judicial reputation as chancellor of New York, he has no separate part devoted to equity. Law and equity are discussed side by side throughout the four volumes under the various topics. Other two legal works are associated with Kent's name--a revision of New York Laws, prepared with Jacob Radcliff (2 vols. , 1801), and an annotated edition of the charter of New York City, 1836.
Of non-legal writing he did little, and that little only to prepare addresses for particular occasions. He was, however, a man of wide learning and literary taste, the result of a lifetime of systematic reading and study. Undoubtedly this habit broadened his thinking, and gave to his opinions and his Commentaries a grace which increased their effectiveness. "I know not how it is, " wrote Joseph Story, in 1831, "but you carry me a voluntary captive in all your labors, whether in law or in literature. You throw over everything which you touch a fresh and mellow coloring, which elevates while it warms, and convinces us that the picture is truth and the artist a master. " His reading habits were formed during the comparative leisure of the first years of practice in Poughkeepsie. He was influenced to take up the study of the classics by the example of Edward Livingston, and he gave up reading Greek only when in old age his eyesight was failing. He divided his day between his profession, the languages, and belles-lettres. Gradually the small, well-chosen library which he owned in 1793 when he moved to New York City, grew into a large and valuable collection. "My library has at present, " he wrote in 1807, "prodigious charms and incomprehensible interest. "
In 1828, his 3, 000 volumes included nearly every work, authority, or document referred to in the three volumes already published of his Commentaries. "Next to my wife, my library has been the source of my greatest pleasure and devoted attachment, " he wrote in 1828; and in his eightieth year, he said that his ardor for reading was as alive as ever, and that he remained fully sensitive to the charms of nature, of literature, and society. Nearly every volume in his library shows evidence of use, and of his habit of reading pen in hand. In many volumes, letters are inserted relating to the author, or the donor; and on fly-leaves he jotted down not only criticisms and observations on the books, on the authors of them, and on persons and events mentioned in them, but items concerning the intimate affairs of his own professional and family life. This devoted attachment to reading far and wide gave him a lifetime of pleasure but also was professionally helpful. His reading in foreign law furnishes an example in point. "I made much use of the Corpus Juris, " he said of his experience on the bench, "and as the Judges knew nothing of French or civil law, I had an immense advantage over them. I could generally put my brethren to rout and carry my point by my mysterious wand of French and civil law".
Kent's last years were happily occupied in reading, preparing new editions of his Commentaries, and in writing occasional opinions. He spent his last summers at a cottage in Essex County, New Jersey, and his winters in New York City. Until the time of his death he suffered no serious illness, and he died in New York at the age of eighty-four.
Personality
Kent was small of stature, with a head large in proportion to his body. His forehead was high and his eyes widely separated, giving to the upper half of his countenance a mild and thoughtful expression. His mouth was large and his lower lip set forward so that, seen in profile, it gave him a look almost of pugnacity. It indicated, however, determination and steadfastness rather than combativeness.
He was firm in the maintenance of his own rights as an individual even when he did not care to exercise those rights. When a temperance committee urged him to sanction their aims and set an example by pledging himself not to use intoxicating liquors, he replied, "Gentlemen, I refuse to sign any pledge. I never have been drunk, and, by the blessing of God, I never will get drunk, but I have a constitutional privilege to get drunk, and that privilege I will not sign away". He rigidly regulated his own life, but resented any other kind of personal control. His best work both as judge and writer was done while he worked alone. He gave heed to this trait when, after retiring from the chancellorship, he declined to serve on a committee to revise the New York laws, but was willing, although the offer was not accepted, to undertake the task alone.
On account of his phenomenal memory, combined with his omnivorous reading, he was reputed by the members of the New York Bar to know all about everything he had ever studied, and to have studied almost everything. It was said that he literally forgot nothing.