Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 20.pdf/26

 Thayer's Legal Essays Cloth, $3.50 FOR twenty-eight years (1874 to 1902) JAMES BRADLEY THAYER served as professor in the Harvard Law School. "No one can measure," says Dean Ames, "his great influence upon the thousands of his pupils. While at the school they had a profound respect for his character and ability, and realized that they were sitting at the feet of a master. In their after life his precept and example have been, and will continue to be, a constant stimulus to genuine, thorough and finished work." In these years he gave so much time to teaching, and he was so thorough in his methods of study and work, that he accomplished little in legal authorship (so far as quantity is concerned), compar able to his influence as a teacher on his generation of lawyers. He compiled for the use of his classes excellent collections of Cases on Evidence and on Constitutional Law, and published a " Pre liminary Treatise on the Law of Evidence," which gave him a reputation, both at home and abroad, as a legal historian and jurist of the first rank. He planned, but never finished, a practical work giving a concise statement of the existing law of Evidence, and a treatise on Constitutional Law. It appears from notes in his diary that he also had it in mind in the meantime to collect in book form some of the essays which he had prepared on many different occasions. The shape in which these were left makes this work possible after his death, and it is of special value from the fact that much of the material which would have gone into the proposed treatise on Constitutional Law may be found in these essays. Thus in a measure they pre serve the fruits of his long and deep study of constitutional topics; and illustrate — to use the words of " The Green Bag" — "the excellent and cultured style, the charming modesty, the deep learning and vigorous thinking, which mark all that Professor Thayer has written."

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