Atrocious Judges : Lives of Judges Infamous as Tools of Tyrants and Instruments of Oppression. John Campbell

21

Hyde, (afterwards Lord Clarendon,) himself a lawyer, by whom the usurpations of this court were brought to the notice of Parliament, stated that more damages had been given by the earl marshal in his days, for words of supposed defamation, of which the law took no notice, than by all the courts of Westminster Hall during a whole term.

22

The name is sometimes spelt Brabaçon, Brabançon, Brabason, and Brabanson.

23

Hume, who designates them “desperate ruffians,” says “troops of them were sometimes enlisted in the service of one prince or baron, sometimes in that of another; they often acted in an independent manner, and under leaders of their own. The greatest monarchs were not ashamed, on occasion, to have recourse to their assistance; and as their habits of war and depredation had given them experience, hardiness, and courage, they generally composed the most formidable part of those armies which decided the political quarrels of princes.” – Vol. i. 438. In America we have no mercenary soldiers, but plenty of mercenary politicians, almost as much to be dreaded. —Ed.

24

They were removed because, during the king’s absence on the continent, they had been guilty of taking bribes, and other misdemeanors. Of De Wayland, one of their number, and the first chief justice of the Common Pleas, Lord Campbell gives the following account: When arrested, on the king’s return from Aquitaine, conscious of his guilt, he contrived to escape from custody, and, disguising himself in the habit of a monk, he was admitted among friars-minors in a convent at Bury St. Edmund’s. However, being considered a heinous offender, sharp pursuit was made after him, and he was discovered wearing a cowl and a serge jerkin. According to the law of sanctuary, then prevailing, he was allowed to remain forty days unmolested. At the end of that time the convent was surrounded by a military force, and the entry of provisions into it was prohibited. Still it would have been deemed sacrilegious to take him from his asylum by violence; but the lord chief justice preferred surrendering himself to perishing from want. He was immediately conducted to the Tower of London. Rather than stand a trial, he petitioned for leave to abjure the realm; this favor was granted to him on condition that he should be attainted, and forfeit all his lands and chattels to the crown. Having walked barefoot and bareheaded, with a crucifix in his hand, to the sea side at Dover, he was put on board a ship and departed to foreign parts. He is said to have died in exile, and he left a name often quoted as a reproach to the bench till he was superseded by Jeffreys and Scroggs.

25

That is, in the ordinary discharge of his duties. His attempt to take away the liberties of the Scotch we shall presently see. —Ed.

26

Just like our northern candidates for the presidency, and the dough-face politicians who contrive to get chosen to Congress by northern constituencies, whose rights they then barter away and betray. —Ed.

27

This is the very ground upon which it is attempted, now, to justify the repeal of the Missouri prohibition of slavery, while Brabacon’s defence of English judges in Scotland is a counterpart to the justification by our federal judges of the authority given to slave-catching commissioners. —Ed.

28

May the pending attempts of the Southern States, countenanced and supported by the federal judges, to establish a “superiority” and “direct dominion” over the north, be met and repelled with similar spirit and success! —Ed.

29

He had been murdered by a body of insurgent peasants headed by Jack Straw, one of the leaders in Wat Tyler’s insurrection. —Ed.

30

Some of our federal judges would no doubt like very much to see this rule established among us. —Ed.

31

The persistence of Richard II. in the same arbitrary principles of which the advocacy cost Tresilian his life, caused his deposition a few years afterwards, as to which, Lord Campbell observes, —

“While we honor Lord Somers and the patriots who took the most active part in the revolution of 1688, by which a king was cashiered, hereditary right was disregarded, and a new dynasty was placed on the throne, we are apt to consider the kings of the house of Lancaster as usurpers, and those who sided with them as rebels. Yet there is great difficulty in justifying the deposition of James II., and condemning the deposition of Richard II. The latter sovereign, during a reign of above twenty years, had proved himself utterly unfit to govern the nation, and, after repeated attempts to control him, and promises on his part to submit to constitutional advice, he was still under the influence of worthless favorites, and was guilty of continued acts of tyranny and oppression; so that the nation, which, with singular patience, had often forgiven his misconduct from respect to the memory of his father and his grandfather, was now almost unanimously resolved to submit no longer to his rule.”

32

Fuller, in praising Fortescue and Markham, says, “These I may call two chief justices of the chief justices, for their signal integrity; for though the one of them favored the house of Lancaster, and the other of York, in the titles to the crown, both of them favored the house of Justice in matters betwixt party and party.”

33

A list by no means limited to England, but very much lengthened out in America. —Ed.

34

Some of our American advocates of constructive treasons have laid down the law much in the same spirit. —Ed.

35

It was, we may suppose, from this charge that Mr. Justice Curtis, of the Supreme Court of the United States, got the law retailed in his charge to the grand jury of the Massachusetts District, in consequence of which indictments were found against Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker for obstructing the execution of the fugitive slave act – on the ground that certain speeches of theirs in Faneuil Hall against that statute “referred to a purpose” and “incited to an act” of resistance to it, thereby making their expression of opinion criminal. —Ed.

36

The recent claim set up in America for legislative supremacy over conscience – a claim contended for by so many of our leading lawyers and divines – is not less blasphemous and outrageous than this claim of Henry VIII., and belongs to the same category. —Ed.

37

This would hardly be allowed by some of our American juridical deniers and deriders of the “higher law.” It is hard to distinguish a law (such as the fugitive slave act) which sets the moral sentiment at defiance, from a law that God shall not be God. —Ed.

38

One striking instance, among a thousand, both old and new, how little the so much vaunted decisions of courts virtually amount to. Decisions that are to stand, can only stand upon their own inherent rectitude and reasonableness, and not upon the authority of those who make them. —Ed.

39

Noy at this time was of the popular party. He afterwards went over to the court, and was made attorney general. —Ed.

40

Similar pretences of respect for law and popular rights often serve as preface here in America to judgments as atrocious as that of Chief Justice Hyde. —Ed.

41

This is the universal excuse for all sins, whether of omission or commission, on the part of courts who pay but little regard to Bishop Burnet’s sensible observation that a precedent against reason “signifies no more but that the like injustice has been done before.” —Ed.

42

Though the lawyers, both in England and America, have long since abandoned the pretence, so impudently maintained by Hyde, of a right in the executive authorities to imprison for contempt, into the ground and nature of which the courts had no right to inquire, they still claim for themselves and for one another – at least in Pennsylvania – a like