JOHN LOWELL. 641 



distinguished all his work to the study and investigation of these cases, 

 and by the common consent of the counsel practising in patent cases, 

 proved himself an excellent patent judge. 



His judicial opinions are marked by clearness of thought, and the 

 direct, terse, and vigorous expression of it, with no digressions, no dis- 

 cussions or dicta not absolutely necessary to the determination of the 

 precise points before him. In deciding a cause he took the line of least 

 resistance ; if it were a short cut he availed himself of it, and this not 

 so much because this course saved him labor, as because he intended his 

 judgment to be confined to the determination of the case actually before 

 him. He was careful, therefore, not to stray from the real questions at 

 issue, and to avoid being beguiled into by-paths of interesting legal 

 investigation which had but little or no tendency to enlighten or aid him 

 in arriving at his conclusions, and were not important in determining 

 his final results. 



He had a natural aptitude for the law, one might almost say a legal 

 instinct, and this was strengthened and quickened by thought and study ; 

 he possessed as a judge a remarkable intuition " for perceiving on which 

 side lay the justice of any case and an equally remarkable ingenuity in 

 showing that a decision in favor of that side was in accordance with 

 the settled rules of law." When he found himself obliged to yield to 

 precedents which prevented what justice seemed to him to require, he 

 did so with a reluctance which he never tried to conceal and sometimes 

 openly expressed. His quiet humor not infrequently enlivened the trial 

 of a cause, and occasionally appeared in his Opinions, as when in denying 

 a motion to set aside a verdict because one juror had been asleep during 

 part of the trial, he said : " If one of the jurors was asleep, the defend- 

 ant should have called attention to the fact at the time. There is no 

 suggestion that it is newly discovered, and I cannot now say that the 

 defendant may not have thought his interests were promoted by the 

 actual course of the trial in this respect." Or, to quote one more 

 instance, — in a suit where a ship owner contended that the master had 

 forfeited his wages by taking on board some casks of Madeira wine, the 

 ship articles prohibiting him from carrying distilled spirits under penalty 

 of forfeiting his pay, Judge Lowell demolished the elaborate argument 

 of the counsel for the ship owner by saying, " Wine is not distilled 

 spirits, and cannot be made so by a usage of the port of New Bedford or 

 any other process that I am acquainted with, except distillation." 



Any attempt to characterize Judge Lowell's judicial qualities would 

 be imperfect if it failed to recognize and call attention to the fact that 

 vol. xxxv. — 41 



