maxims and usages which were convenient and harm-
less in backwoods country towns." This is no less
true of many of our more serious legal abuses. In
particular many crudities in judicial organization
and procedure are demonstrably legacies of the
frontier. Moreover the spirit of American law
of the nineteenth century was sensibly affected by
the spirit of the pioneer.

For most practical purposes American judicial his-
tory begins after the Revolution. Administration
of justice in colonial America was at first executive
and legislative, and these types of non-judicial jus-
tice persisted well into the last century. Again
with a few conspicuous exceptions the courts before
and for some time after the Revolution were made
up largely of untrained magistrates who admin-
istered justice according to their common sense and
the light of nature with some guidance from legis-
lation. Until the Revolution in most of the colo-
nies it was not considered necessary or even expe-
dient to have judges learned in the law. Of the
three justices of the Superior Court in New Hamp-
shire after independence, one was a clergyman and
another a physician. A judge of the highest court
of Rhode Island from 1814 to 1818 was a black-
smith, and the chief justice of that state from 1819
to 1826 was a farmer. When James Kent went
upon the bench in New York in 1791, he could say
with entire truth: "There were no reports or state
precedents. The opinions from the bench were de-
livered ore tenus. We had no law of our own
and nobody knew what [the law] was."

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