Glossary of Technical Terms: Phrases, and Maxims of the Common Law (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Glossary of Technical Terms: Phrases, and Ma...)
Excerpt from Glossary of Technical Terms: Phrases, and Maxims of the Common Law
This book is the result of an attempt to produce a concise Law Dictionary, giving in common English an explanation of the words and phrases, English as well as Saxon, Latin, or French, which are of common technical use in the law. It is not a compilation of law, like the larger dictionaries, but consists purely of definition. Only such civil law, canon law, or Scotch terms have been introduced as are often used in the common-law courts. The writer has sought to give the popular and usual acceptation of each phrase, in much the same rough and general shape in which it would stand in the mind of the trained lawyer; only occasionally adding a hint of its more correct and exact meaning. More definite information must then be sought in the text-books. Unless otherwise mentioned, the definition is given according to the common law of England; and the date or present existence of the thing defined is only roughly indicated by the tense.
It has been impossible within the limits assigned to make the book exhaustive; but it is hoped that a judicious selection has been made of the more important catchwords, writs, courts, and maxims; and that, in seeking to compress the greatest amount of matter in the smallest possible space, the author has been concise, without being inaccurate and obscure.
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Frederic Jesup Stimson was an American lawyer, diplomat, and author, sought throughout a long life to maintain, in an industrialized and heterogeneous nation, the values and perspectives of an aristocrat reared in the "true democracy" of the New England town.
Background
Although it is usually stated that he was born on July 20, 1855 in Dedham, Massachussets, that town's vital records do not list him, and the movements of his family in the 1850's suggest that his birthplace may have been either New York City or Dubuque, Iowa. His roots, however, were in Dedham, where his paternal grandfather, a physician and banker, had settled in 1804; and the Stimson line in Massachusetts extends back at least to 1670. The only child of Edward and Sarah Tufts (Richardson) Stimson, Frederic led a distinctly privileged life, traveling widely.
His father, a graduate of Harvard and its medical school, practiced in New York City for a time and then, moving west because of his wife's poor health (she died in 1858), entered the banking business in Dubuque with Frederic S. Jesup of New York City and became president of the Dubuque and Pacific Railroad. Frederic thus passed his early boyhood in Iowa. In the mid-1860's Edward Stimson sold the railroad, was married again (to his cousin Charlotte Godfrey Leland of Philadelphia, by whom he had a daughter, Elsie) and "retired" to Dedham.
Education
After a year at a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, Frederic entered Harvard. He received his A. B. in 1876 and, after two years in the Harvard Law School, the LL. B. degree.
Career
Stimson established a law practice in Boston, specializing in railroad law. He was an incorporator, vice-president, and general counsel of the State Street Trust Company of Boston and sat on many corporation boards.
Stimson's interest in labor law found expression in his article "The Modern Use of Injunctions" (Political Science Quarterly, June 1895), an early attack on the use of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against labor combinations. In his Labor in Its Relations to Law (1895) he supported labor's aspirations but argued strongly that it should seek justice not through the closed shop but through noncoercive "collective bargaining. " A year later Stimson's useful Handbook to the Labor Law of the United States appeared.
In 1897 he was appointed advisory counsel to the United States Industrial Commission, a post he held for the next four years, during which he compiled two volumes on American and European labor legislation. Meanwhile Stimson had in 1891 been appointed to a Massachusetts state commission supporting the American Bar Association's effort to promote uniform legislation throughout the United States. He shared the Association's fear that if the states did not voluntarily reduce interstate legal conflict, the federal government would coerce them and disturb the delicately balanced federal system.
As secretary of the national conference of state commissioners from 1891 to 1902 and, by the end of this period, chairman of the Massachusetts commission, Stimson was specially interested in unifying state commercial law, reforming divorce law, and making Southern laws regulating child labor and factory hours as strong as Northern ones. While serving on the Massachusetts Commission on Corporation Laws in 1902-03, Stimson wrote, with Charles Washburn, the 1903 law which significantly relaxed that state's stringent control over corporate financing.
He had returned in 1902 to law practice in Boston, at the same time accepting a part-time position in the history and government department at Harvard, first as lecturer on "Tendencies of American Legislation" and, from 1904 to 1915, as professor of comparative legislation.
His compilations and digests, the fruit of prodigious labor, were first-rate; his scholarship - especially his adherence to the Teutonic theory of legal history - was thin and outdated.
In 1914 President Wilson appointed Stimson ambassador to Argentina. He served until 1921 and was credited with helping induce the neutral Argentines to sell large quantities of wheat to the allies during World War I. Throughout his life Stimson had a "second career" as an author. Between 1882 and 1922 he published (in the '80's under the pen name "J. S. of Dale") seven novels, four collections of short stories and novellas, and several lesser works. His short stories appeared in popular magazines well into the 1930's.
His first novels - including the very successful romance of Harvard undergraduate life, Guerndale (1882) - identified him as one of a school of upper-class Boston novelists that included his friends Russell Sullivan, Arlo Bates, Robert Grant and John T. Wheelwright.
Another friend, John Boyle O'Reilly, helped Stimson plot perhaps his best work, King Noanett (1896).
Most of Stimson's fiction, like his legal writing, celebrated the values of an earlier America. Whatever artistic reputation he earned in his lifetime quickly faded. His literary virtues are preserved in his fine autobiographical survey of America, My United States (1931).
He died in Dedham at the age of eighty-eight of bronchopneumonia.
Stimson's political career had begun soon after his graduation from college, as one of Dedham's regular delegates to the Republican state convention and financial manager for Congressman Theodore Lyman (1833 - 1897).
In 1884 the Republican governor of Massachusetts, George Robinson, named Stimson assistant attorney general. He resigned, however, upon the nomination of James G. Blaine, helped initiate the "Mugwump" movement in Boston and New York City, and became a Democrat, an affiliation he retained until the New Deal. He supported the Gold Democrats rather than Bryan in 1896 and 1900, and played a role in reknitting the divided Massachusetts Democratic party after 1900.
Views
He fought to give full legal rights to the American Indian and protested against American imperialism. In particular, he sought to reconcile his reformer's desire to control trusts and to ensure justice for the laboring man with his fear (which proved dominant) of government interference with individual liberty and property rights.
Quotations:
The "chief pleasure in life, " he concluded, is "to be an all-round man. "
Connections
Stimson was married on June 2, 1881, to Elizabeth Bradlee Abbot, daughter of a Boston merchant. On November 12, 1902, he married Mabel Ashhurst of Philadelphia. His three children, all by the first marriage, were Mildred, Elizabeth Bradlee (who died in infancy), and Margaret Ashton.