Background
William Paine Lord was born on July 1, 1839 in Dover, Delaware, United States, the son of Edward and Elizabeth Paine Lord.
William Paine Lord was born on July 1, 1839 in Dover, Delaware, United States, the son of Edward and Elizabeth Paine Lord.
Lord was educated in the schools of Dover and by private tutors, graduated from Fairfield College, New York, in 1860. Later he entered the law school at Albany, from which he graduated in 1866, and was admitted to practice of law in New York.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Lord enlisted in the Union army, in which he rose to the rank of major. Around 1866, when the war ended, he rejoined the army for a second time, as a second lieutenant, with stations successively at Fort Alcatraz, near San Francisco, Fort Steilacoom, Washington, and, for four months, in Alaska. In the fall of 1868 he resigned his commission to take up the practice of law in Salem, the capital city of Oregon, where he served, in turn, as city attorney, state senator in 1878, justice of the state supreme court from 1880 to 1894, and governor from 1895 to 1899.
His election as governor on the Republican ticket against Nathan Pierce, the candidate of the People's Party, was due in great measure to his personal reputation and popularity. In 1899 he was appointed minister to the Argentine Republic, a position which he held until 1902, when he returned to Oregon to resume the practice of law. His last important public service was to compile and annotate Lord's Oregon Laws.
Lord's eight years as associate justice and his six years as chief justice of the supreme court were the most notable of his career. He made a reputation as one of the judges who have most influenced the jurisprudence of the state. The state bar association selected him, in 1914, as the greatest of Oregon's chief justices, and designated his picture for the frontispiece in the forty-second volume of Corpus Juris (1927). His judicial opinions, when read today, seem characterized by clearness of statement, close reasoning, convincing argument, and a humanitarian point of view, and he seems to have been less influenced by technicalities than other judges of his generation.
Lord was a member of the Republican Party. During his governorship he recommended a policy of retrenchment and economy, the taxation of "all property liable to taxation, " the self-support of the penitentiary, a school law "simple in its provisions and inexpensive in its arrangements, " and such support of the state university as should lift it to "a plane where it may compete with similar institutions in other states". He condemned the practice of creating numerous administrative boards, as dividing executive responsibility and as increasing salaries of the governor and other state officers in violation of the limitations fixed by the constitution.
Lord was married to Juliette Montague of Baltimore, Maryland, on January 14, 1880.
