680 JAMES BRADLEY THAYER. 



In 1874 he was appointed a professor in the Harvard Law School. 

 He had previously declined the offer of a professorship in the English 

 Department of the College. Although his rare gift for thoughtful, 

 graceful, and effective writing could not have failed to make him highly 

 successful as a professor of English, his decision not to give up his 

 chosen profession was doubtless a wise one. Certainly it was a fortu- 

 nate one for the Law School and the law. 



Wherever the Harvard Law School is known, he has been recognized 

 for many years as one of its chief ornaments. When, in 1900, the 

 Association of American Law Schools was formed, it was taken for 

 granted by all the delegates that Professor Thayer was to be its first 

 President. No one can measure his great influence upon the thousands 

 of his pupils. While at the School they had a profound respect for his 

 character and ability, and they realized that they were sitting at the 

 feet of a master of his subjects. In their after life his precept and 

 example have been, and will continue to be, a constant stimulus to 

 genuine, thorough and finished work, and a constant safeguard against 

 hasty generalization or dogmatic assertion. His quick sympathy, his 

 unfailing readiness to assist the learner, out of the class-room as well as 

 in it, and his attractive personality, gave him an exceptionally strong 

 hold upon the affections of the young men. Their attitude towards him 

 is well expressed in a letter from a recent graduate of the School, who 

 describes him as " one of the best known, best liked, and strongest of 

 the Law Professors." 



During the early years of his service he lectured on a variety of 

 legal topics, but Evidence and Constitutional Law were especially con- 

 genial to him, and in the end he devoted himself exclusively to these 

 two subjects, in each of which he had prepared for the use of his 

 classes an excellent collection of cases. Evidence was an admirable 

 field for his powers of historical research and analytical judgment. He 

 recognized that our artificial rules of evidence were the natural out- 

 growth of trial by jury, and could only be explained by tracing carefully 

 the development of that institution in England. The results of his work 

 appeared in his " Preliminary 7 Treatise on the Law of Evidence," a worthy 

 companion of the masterly "Origin of the Jury," by the distinguished 

 German, Professor Brunner. His book gave him an immediate repu- 

 tation, not only in this country, but in England, as a legal historian and 

 jurist of the first rank. An eminent English lawyer, in reviewing it, 

 described it as " a book which goes to the root of the subject more 

 thoroughly than any other text-book in existence." 



