336 JOEL PARKER. 



JOEL PARKER. 



The limited space within which the Academy is obliged to confine 

 the notices of its departed members, in the published volumes of its 

 Proceedings, gives but little opportunity to do justice to the memory 

 of the Hon. Joel Parker, of Cambridge, whose death occurred 

 August 17, 1875, at the age of eighty years. 



He became a Fellow of the Academy February 1, 1853. 



He was born in JafFrey, N.H., January 25. 1795, the youngest of 

 nine children of the Hon. Abel Parker, who was for many years 

 Judge of Probate for the County of Cheshire. He was prepared 

 for Dartmouth College at Groton Academy, and graduated in 1811, 

 being then less than seventeen years of age. Among his classmates 

 were Amos Kendall, and Chief Justice Shepley, of Maine. He was 

 admitted to the Bar of Cheshire County in October, 1817, and en- 

 tered upon the practice of the law in Keene, which, with the exception 

 of about a year, was his place of residence till his removal to Cam- 

 bridge, in 1848. After a career of distinguished success at the Bar, 

 and a service of two years in the Legislature of that State, he was 

 appointed a Judge of the Suj^erior Court of New Hampshire in 1833, 

 and to the place of its Chief Justice in 1838. He held judicial office 

 with great acceptance to the Bar and the public till 1848, when, 

 having been invited to the Royall Professorsliip in the Harvard Law 

 School, he resigned his place upon the bench, and entered upon the 

 duties of his new appointment. He held this office till 1868, when he 

 resigned it, and from 1868 to 1874, without changing his residence, he 

 gave courses of lectures as a Professor of Law to the Senior Class in 

 Dartmouth College, upon the Constitution of the United States. He 

 also lectured upon the same subject to the members of the Columbian 

 Law School in Washington. He was a professor of Medical Juris- 

 prudence in the Medical School of the last-named institution from 

 1847 to 1857. He had previously lectured on the same subject in 

 1851 in the Boylston Medical School, and in the Medical College in 

 New York. His public services, after removing to Cambridge, aside 

 from his duties as a professor and lecturer, consisted of a member- 

 ship of the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts in 1853, and 

 an active part in the revision of the statutes of that State, to which he 

 was appointed in 1855. Among the indications of the estimate in 

 which he was held as a jurist and scholar, may be mentioned the 

 degree of LL.D., which was conferred upon him by his Alma Mater 

 in 1837, and by Harvard College in 1848. He was also a member 

 of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 



