Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 25.pdf/392

 James M. Kerr, of California

367

MR. KERR'S BUNGALOW AT PASADENA In the fireproof library building adjoining he does all his legal work

the bars of various courts, state and federal, in which he subsequently prac tised or had causes pending, including the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1888. He commenced the practice in the county seat of his native county, utilizing the leisure hours, incident to the building up of a practice by a young lawyer, in study and the preparation of "essays" or articles on narrow and abstruse legal points. These essays he published in the leading law journals and monthly professional pub lications of the time, including the SouthernLaw Review, CentralLaw Journal, Western Jurist, American Law Record, American Law Register, Albany Law Journal, and others. His activities and output in this direction were of such an extent, and the matter of his articles of such interest and value, that in the first volume of "Jones' Index to Legal Periodicals" (published in 1888), Mr. Kerr is given credit for having written

and published more legal articles of interest to the legal profession, and worthy of preservation, than any other person in either England or America, with the exceptions of Judge Isaac Redfield, for a great number of years one of the editors of the American Law Register, and Irving Browne, for more than twenty years the editor of the Albany Law Journal. Mr. Kerr early drifted from the active practice into legal journalism to such an extent that legal authorship has ever since been his vocation, and the practice of the law but an avocation. In 1882 he joined Charles A. Lord and James H. Bowman in the Ohio Law Journal, as the editor of that publication. In 1884 he founded, in connection with George H. Manchester, the American Law Journal at Columbus, Ohio, and con ducted it successfully until Banks & Brothers, who were the official publishers of the Ohio Law Reports, sought to