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THE GREEN BAG

sheriff according to the law of North Caro lina, and a similar treatise on executors. In connection with the first especially he made himself thoroughly familiar with the common law as well as with the statutes, and was also led into minute studies on the early history of North -Carolina, upon which he began to take notes. His next legal work was a remarkable tour de force. He translated Pothier on Obligations, "a book for which he had a profound respect, and at this time so complete was his skill as a translator and typesetter, that in execut ing the work he used no manuscript, but rendered the French directly into English type in the composing-stick."1 Elected a member of the House of Com mons in the legislature of his adopted state, he found opportunities for perfecting and extending his notes on the history of the state which he was planning. More over, he was commissioned by the legisla ture to publish the revised statutes of the state, which appeared from his press at Xewbern in 1804. Thus as lawyer and printer he was doing good service, and his reputation as a peculiarly sound and able lawyer was firmly established. He had already amassed at least a competence, but the habits of frugality, practised as a necessity in the beginning, had now become second nature, and he worked as hard and spent as little as in the days of early struggle. He was already a man well advanced in years, and had achieved no small success; but there was yet a long life and a far more distinguished career before him. President Madison appointed him judge in the terri tory of Mississippi, and he accepted. Little more than a year later he was transferred to the Superior Court of the territory of Or leans, March 21, 1810, and came to New Orleans. The town was then enjoying its first period of rapid growth under the stim ulus of American control and expanding

traffic on the river, for in the seven years since the purchase the population had more than doubled; the town of seventeen thou sand inhabitants might soon with some justice call itself a city, and the territory was even then preparing to turn itself into a state. But it was as yet but a state in the making, with a more heterogeneous popu lation than goes to the makeup of most of the commonwealths of this notoriously composite union, and above all with a system of jurisprudence yet to be made out of the many differing codes and statutes that had more or less vigor in the community that had known three different masters within a decade. Judge Martin himself gives a whimsical account of the complications of legal theory and the embarrassments of legal practice at the time of his coming: "The Fuero Viejo, Fuero Juezgo, Partidas, Recopilationes, Leyes de las Indias, Autos Accordados, and Royal Schedules remained parts of the written law of the territory when not repealed expressly or by neces sary implication. Of these musty laws the copies were extremely rare; a complete col lection of them was in the hands of no one, and of very many of them not a single copy existed in the province. To explain them Spanish commentators were consulted and the corpus juris civilis and its own commen tators were resorted to; and to eke out any deficiency, the lawyers who came from France or Hispaniola read Pothier, D 'Aguesseau, Dumoulin, etc. Courts of justice -were furnished with interpreters of the French, Spanish, and English languages; these translated the evidence and the charge of the court, when necessary, but not the arguments of the counsel. The case was often opened in the English language, and then the jurymen who did not understand the counsel were indulged with leave to withdraw from the box into the gallery. The defense, being in French, they were recalled, and the indulgence shown to them 1 Judge W. W. Howe, Introduction to edition of was enjoyed by their companions who were strangers to that language. All went to Martin's " History of I a.," p. x.