234 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



No code of statute laAv, however elaborate, or erected upon experi- 

 ence however universal, could provide for a multitude of novel cases 

 that would be presented for adjudication within one year after its en- 

 actment. The infinite variety of human capacities, feelings, intei'ests, 

 and motives, and the ever-multiplying novelties in enterprise and social 

 relations, must ever throw back legal judgment on rights and duties in 

 human life upon first principles ; and hence the inevitable necessity for 

 what is termed judicial legislation, — the establishment of the law by 

 the court in an individual case, to govern all thereafter arising, falling 

 within the like application of the same principles. And no department 

 of human labor, therefore, in science or art, calls for greater capacity 

 of comprehension and investigation, more acute penetration and far- 

 seeing wisdom, or more entire soundness of heart, than that of the 

 judgment seat. And more especially is this combination of faculties 

 demanded at periods when the expansion of commerce and of business 

 relations to new dimensions and in multiplied varieties, and the intro- 

 duction of new modes of entoi-prise, call for a corresponding enlarge- 

 ment of the foundations and boundaries of jurisprudence. 



And it was at such a stage in the affairs of men .that this great judge 

 was commissioned for his high trust. The changes and modifications 

 of public sentiment concerning laws regulating the domestic relations ; 

 the vast and rapidly augmenting increase of commercial adventure, in- 

 volving corresponding multiplied connections and calling into birth new 

 species and forms of obligation, written and implied ; the comparatively 

 recent introduction of a new system of associated enterprise in manu- 

 facturing corporations, already widely spread if not originating in New 

 England, and before unknown ; and the gradual ingrafting of the Eng- 

 lish system of Equity Jurisprudence upon the administrative duties of 

 our courts of common law, opened wide and constantly enlarging fields 

 for the development of principles of previous comparatively limited ap- 

 plication, and for the unfolding of others, before unrecognized, lying at 

 the foundation of the new combinations thus brought into being. Hap- 

 pily his associates upon the bench, at his accession to it, were also 

 men of eminent ability and great learning, and some of them of long 

 judicial experience ; thus with him constituting a combination of in- 

 tellectual power and moral influence remarkably adapted for the exist- 

 ing and coming emergencies, for maintaining the pre-eminence of the 

 Commonwealth in these new fields of science which their predecessors 

 had established in the old, and for transmitting to posterity her system 



