The American Cyclopædia (1879)/Greenleaf, Simon

GREENLEAF, Simon, an American jurist, born Newburyport, Mass., Dec. 5, 1783, died in Cambridge, Oct. 6, 1853. He practised law in Massachusetts and afterward in Maine, was reporter of the supreme court of Maine from 1820 to 1832, and during this period published nine volumes of reports, and a treatise on the

“Origin and Principles of Free-Masonry” (Portland, 1820). In 1833 he became professor of law in Harvard university, and held this office till 1848. In 1840 he published a volume of “Overruled, Denied, and Doubted Decisions and Dicta,” which was expanded in subsequent editions to three volumes. In 1846 he published an “Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists, by the Rules of Evidence as administered in Courts of Justice, with an Account of the Trial of Jesus.” In 1849 he published an edition of Cruise's “Digest of the Law of Real Property.” But his great work was a “Treatise on the Law of Evidence” (3 vols., 1842-'53).