Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 03.pdf/20

 The Green Bag.

Vol. III. No. i.  BOSTON. January, 1891.

BENJAMIN VAUGHAN ABBOTT.

EW names, perhaps, have been more widely known to the present generation of the profession throughout this country than that of Benjamin Vaughan Abbott, one of the authors of the modern style of digest, and one of the commissioners by whom the revised statutes of the United States were prepared.

He was born in Boston, June 4, 1830. His father, Jacob Abbott, the author of the Rollo Books, "The Young Christian," "The Franconia Stories," and a series of volumes known as Abbott's Histories, was then engaged in founding the Mount Ver non School in that city. Mr. Abbott's early studies were at home, under the direction of his father. In 1846 he entered the University of the City of New York, where he enjoyed the instruction and personal in tercourse of Chancellor Frelinghuysen, Elias Loomis, John William Draper, Taylor Lewis, and others of that brilliant faculty. After graduation, in 1850, his disposition for thorough research led him to seek the advantages of a year at the Harvard Law School, returning thence to perfect his studies in New York, where he was admitted to the bar in 1852, at the time when the then new code of procedure was going into full operation. He formed a law partnership with his younger brother Austin, and spent some years in active practice, the third brother, Lyman, now pastor of Plymouth Church, joining them, as a student in their office, on his graduation from college; and the three soon became widely known in active practice. The late John S. Voorhies, whose law book store at 20 Nassau Street was so long a sort of rendezvous for New York lawyers, proposed to the brothers to prepare for him reports of cases of practice under the New Procedure. The success of this series be ing immediately assured, he subsequently proposed to them the preparation of a New York Digest. From this starting-point Mr. Abbott devoted himself to legal writing, dealing chiefly with the Reports and Digests of State and National law; and his additions to legal literature have been welcomed as accurate and valuable. The New York Digest gained attention at once throughout the country by reason of some novel features which facilitated its use as a repository of the law of the State which has been for many younger States the leader in jurisprudence. Previous New York Digests had usually been made by copying the head-notes from the Reports, and reduplicating each head-note under as many subjects as were embraced within it, in order to make sure that it should be found by the reader of each subject. It. was necessary, on account of the greatly increased number of Reports, to avoid such reduplication, and the more so because it was desired by an original examination of every reported case to include in the new digest many points of law and practice which had escaped attention in the head-notes. For this purpose Mr. Abbott and his brother, having taken their home together in Brooklyn, spent the leisure of two years in a careful analysis of the best treatises on every branch of the law, and drawing up a concise and sharply defined outline of what each title in the Digest should contain, and 1