Shaw, Lemuel (1781–1861), jurist.A Harvard graduate who began legal practice after a three‐year apprenticeship in a
Boston law office, Shaw first gained famed and fortune as the legal voice of Boston's leading mercantile families in the early nineteenth century. A Federalist, he vehemently opposed the
War of 1812 and drafted Boston's first city charter in 1822. He was appointed chief justice of the supreme judicial court of Massachusetts in 1830, at a time when whole areas of the law remained unsettled. For the next thirty years he dominated the court, writing some two thousand majority opinions. No other state judge before or since has exerted so great an impact. Oliver Wendell
Holmes Jr. labeled Shaw “the greatest magistrate which this country has produced.”
Shaw has sometimes been portrayed as a “liberal” because of one well‐known decision,
Commonwealth v.
Hunt (1842), in which he ruled that workers could strike whenever an employer hired nonunion labor. This opinion, freeing labor unions from the old doctrine of criminal conspiracy, has been hailed as labor's Magna Carta. But most of Shaw's decisions favored corporate interests, especially
railroads, and the burgeoning market economy. In 1849, upholding racial
segregation in Boston's public schools, he originated the “separate but equal” doctrine that later became the legal justification for segregation throughout much of the nation. Hostile to
slavery, Shaw freed slaves brought into Massachusetts by their master. In 1851, however, he refused to release the fugitive slave Thomas Sims and wrote the leading opinion justifying the constitutionality of the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
See also
Antebellum Era;
Jurisprudence;
Labor Movements;
Legal Profession;
Strikes and Industrial Conflict.
Bibliography
Leonard W. Levy , The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw, 1957.
Leonard L. Richards
