Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 03.pdf/146

Rh short time it was evident that he was born a lawyer, and was possessed of a mental organization strictly legal. Success at once attended his efforts, and his forensic reputation continued to increase until he was removed from the forum to adorn the bench. His practice at the bar was extensive and lucrative. The causes in which he was engaged required the examination and discussion of the principles underlying every branch of law; and hence he became familiar, not alone with the civil law peculiar to Louisiana, but with commercial, criminal, and constitutional law. He was a lawyer par excellence, a master of the civil law. The profession then recognized in him, as it does now, a most learned, accomplished, and profound civilian. With this prestige and with robust health, Mr. Bermudez assumed the judicial ermine at the age of forty-six.

During the régime of reconstruction governors, elected to office under the reconstruction Constitution of 1868, the delays in the administration of justice had so crowded the docket of the Supreme Court that an ordinary case could not be reached in due course for two or three years after the transcript of appeal was filed. The court appointed by Governor Nicholls in 1877 had not remained in office long enough to arrest the congestion.

Chief-Justice Bermudez, endowed with breadth of intellect, with a strong and determined will, and with a capacity for labor equalled only by his love of the study and the investigation of legal principles, made such inroads on the accumulated business of the court that the mountain of cases has disappeared, and now and for several years past, a cause is called for argument in the Supreme Court of Louisiana within a month after it is entered on the docket, unless it be delayed by vacation.



When at the bar, Chief-Justice Bermudez was distinguished by a keen sense of honor, and was governed by a high standard of professional ethics; on the bench he is characterized by the most stringent honesty and integrity. He has the faculty of penetrating and sagacious observation, as well as the gift of a nice and correct discrimination. He excels in analyzing and deducing the complicated parts of a subject, and sees everything in the daylight of truth, unaffected by the coloring imparted by the imagination. His opinions are clear and terse; he may be said to write with his muscles. In his style there is coherence, order, method; but it is a concise, rapid style, sometimes advancing in a series of epithets, and in sentences short and sharp.

On the whole, the people of Louisiana are well satisfied with their Chief-Justice, who has discharged the duties of this high office for eleven years with distinguished ability and impartiality.

Among the many associate justices who have graced the bench of the Supreme Court, none occupied a more exalted position in the respect, confidence, and admiration of the people of the State than Mr. Justice Felix