Kent, James (1763-1847)

American Eras

James Kent (1763-1847)

Sources

Jurist and scholar

Training. James Kent’s early years illustrated the development of the elite bar in post-Revolutionary New York that also featured Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and Edward Livingston. Kent’s father, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was an attorney in Dutchess County, New York, where James was born in 1763. The future jurist entered Yale College in 1777 but did not graduate until 1781 because the Revolutionary War periodically interrupted his studies. During one suspension of classes he read William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769); he later recalled that the classic work “inspired me, at the age of fifteen with awe, and I fondly determined to be a lawyer.” After preparing for three years in the Poughkeepsie office of Attorney General Egbert Benson, he was admitted to the New York bar in 1785 and joined a partnership with Gilbert Livingston. Eight years later he moved to New York City.

Federalist Politics. After observing the constitutional convention held in Poughkeepsie in 1788, Kent became an ardent admirer of Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. His subsequent support for the Federalist Party resulted in a brief career in the New York Assembly and a series of important political appointments. In 1793 he was named the first professor of law at Columbia College, a position that he held until 1798. In February 1796 he also assumed the financially rewarding position of master in the Court of Chancery, to which he added one year later an appointment as recorder of the City of New York. He resigned both offices in February 1798 upon his appointment to the New York Supreme Court. Six years later he became the chief judge, and in February 1814 he became chancellor of the state Chancery Court. He participated prominently in the New York constitutional convention of 1821 and vigorously opposed the elimination of property requirements for voters, a reform that Martin Van Buren would make the starting point for the organization of the Jacksonian party system.

Judge. Kent’s service on the bench contributed substantially to the expanded power and prestige of the American judiciary. Through a long-term collaboration with court reporter William Johnson, he systematized the publication of New York judicial decisions. In this form Kent’s opinions were read and followed by judges around the country. He exercised particular influence as chancellor of the state’s equity courts, later recalling that in deciding cases “I saw where justice lay and the moral sense decided the cause half the time, & I then set down to search the authorities until I had exhausted my books, & I might once & a while be embarrassed by a technical rule, but I most always found principles suited to my views of the case.” The jurisdiction of the equity court, which included such crucial economic duties as the supervision of mortgages and corporate charters, gave Kent an opportunity to shape many of the doctrines that had a direct impact on the lives of Americans.

Commentaries on American Law. Because the New York constitution of 1821 required judges to retire at the age of sixty, Kent stepped down from the bench in 1823. Upon moving back from Albany to New York City, he was reappointed to the law professorship at Columbia College that had remained vacant since his resignation a quarter-century earlier. Much like his previous experience of teaching, the lectures he delivered at the school from February 1824 to May 1825 and from October 1825 to April 1826 wearied him and attracted relatively few students. But on the suggestion of his son he undertook to expand the lectures for publication. He published his Commentaries on American Law in four volumes from 1826 to 1830. Dedicated to Johnson, the treatise marked the maturation of American law by presenting a survey worthy of comparison with Blackstone’s Commentaries. Every set of the first edition was sold by December 1830, and Kent saw five subsequent editions through the press before his death. The work remained in print for many years; young Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. prepared the twelfth edition in 1873.

Influence. Kent’s Commentaries divided the law into six parts: the law of nations; constitutional law; municipal law of the states; the rights of persons; the law of personal property; and the law of real property. The work was marked by a lucid prose style and a practical, toughminded approach to legal questions. Discussing a widow’s rights to the property left by her husband, for example, he expressed relief that “in this country, we are, happily, not very liable to be perplexed by such abstruse questions and artificial rules, which have encumbered the subject &in England to a grievous extent.” Kent’s eagerness to rationalize jurisprudence was part of his utilitarian philosophy. He remained a forceful exponent of Hamiltonian principles, eager to use the powers of the state to advance economic growth. He spent his last years mostly in reading and preparing new editions of the Commentaries until his death in 1847.

Sources

John Theodore Horton, James Kent: A Study in American Conservatism (New York: Appleton, 1939);

William Kent, Memoir and Letters of James Kent, LL.D. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898);

Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).

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