Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 10.pdf/28

 Style in Judicial Opinions. open to explanation; but I am not satisfied with this explanation, which appears to in volve a fraud on the persons who were ultimately to pay the passage money." Many examples might be given of Judge Lowell's wit and sarcasm. In one opinion he said : " With regard to the allegation that the libellant [a sea captain] has for feited all his wages by carrying some casks of Madeira wine, when the shipping articles prohibit the bringing of distilled spirits on board the ship under pain of such forfeiture, I can only say that wine is not distilled spirits, and cannot be made so by a usage of the port of New Bedford, or by any other process that I am acquainted with except distillation." A motion had been made before him for a new trial, partly on the ground that one of the jurors had taken a nap during the proceedings. Upon this point Judge Lowell remarked as fol lows : — "If one of the jurors was asleep, the de fendant 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 re spect." In a salvage case, in which the first mate with some of the crew had escaped with great difficulty in an open boat, the ship having foundered, the mate put in a claim for saving the boat, which Judge Lowell disposed of as follows : " The libellant asks salvage for the boat; but as the boat ap

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pears to have saved him quite as much as he the boat, that account is in equilibrio." In one case, that entitled " Fifty Thousand Feet of Timber," Judge Lowell incurred the charge of flippancy from an English court. The case was an important one, and Judge Lowell, in deciding it, laid down a doctrine which was new, or almost new, and the English judge thought that he had not taken the matter quite seriously enough, for Judge Lowell spoke of a certain decision rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States as one in which that Court " made the dis covery that water is water even within the limits of a county." But Judge Lowell was the very reverse of a "slapdash" or careless judge. His decisions bear every mark of conscientious deliberation, and his wit, though perhaps not quite sufficiently restrained, was as natural as his sense of justice. I shall quote two more extracts from Judge Lowell's opinions, the first one being a mere defini tion, and both extracts being so simple that they might be thought insufficient to show either style or the absence of style; and yet I doubt if any unskilled writer could have expressed even these simple ideas in words so few, so precise, and so harmonious : "A roadsted is a place where vessels usually anchor, and a fair-way is where they usually pass and repass." " It is true that acts of bankruptcy may be committed by a solvent person; but when a person solemnly in court admits his insolvency, no one can contradict him, and if he was solvent the moment before he filed his petition, he is insolvent the next moment."

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