Servants of the Law

Judicial Politics on the California Frontier, 1849-89

By (author) Donald R. Burrill

Publication date:

02 December 2010

Length of book:

360 pages

Publisher

University Press of America

Dimensions:

232x155mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780761848912

Servants of the Law examines the lives of two famous California judges, David S. Terry and Stephen J. Field, who created a lasting influence on the politics and judicial history of California's Supreme Court during the court's formative years of 1855 to 1865. These jurists shared the state's highest bench from 1857 to 1859 and, as events would later show, they confronted one another combatively, on and off, for almost thirty-five years. California's beginnings as a United States territory and later as the nation's thirty-first state were, in large part, fashioned in the wake of the country's malevolent and unforgiving the Civil War. Together, Terry and Field's lives served as an animate metaphor for the cultural and constitutional diversity that many nineteenth-century northern and southern judicial immigrants held toward one another.

Chapter 1 Foreword
Chapter 2 Preface
Chapter 3 1. El Dorado
Chapter 4 2. A Hasty Footpath to Statehood
Chapter 5 3. From Juris Civilus to Use and Custom
Chapter 6 4. A Judicial Activist
Chapter 7 5. Justices of the Supreme Bench of California
Chapter 8 6. Persona non Grata
Chapter 9 7. Growing Resentments
Chapter 10 8. Political Dreams
Chapter 11 9. Jus et Fraus Nunquam Cohabitant (Law and Fraud Never Cohabitat)
Chapter 12 10. Injury Unrequited
Chapter 13 11. Dishonor en Absentia
Chapter 14 Selected Bibliography
Chapter 15 Index

This book is not intended to be a precise judicial history of the state of California. Rather, because of the fascinating lives that two justices (Stephen Field and David Terry) lived, it makes for a beguiling narrative about two very human judges and the judicial and personal confrontations between them during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the eyes of their judicial brethren, Terry's legal years began in promise and ended in disgrace, while Field's years began in promise and led to the nation's judicial pantheon.