Carter, James Coolidge (1827-1905)

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James Coolidge Carter (1827-1905)

Lawyer

Reflecting on the Century. James C. Carter, one of the leading lawyers of the nineteenth century, asked his college classmates at their fifty year class reunion in 1900, “What has become of the spirit, the philosophy, the ideals, which held such firm control at the middle of the century?” These ideals had been discredited, if not dismissed, and replaced by “an enormous pressure of material interests which hold in disdain any appeals to the universal principles of truth and right.” These material interests had not been established by appealing to reason, truth, science, or history, but by asserting that this impending materialism was an irresistible force. Anyone who questioned these trends were seen as either “impracticable theorists, or traitors to the interests of humanity.”

Background and Training. Born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, Carter tutored in New York and clerked occasionally in the Wall Street law office of Judge William Kent and Henry E. Davies. He graduated from the Harvard law school in 1853 and was critical of its teaching methods. Until the 1870s Harvard trained men for the law by lecturing to them, giving them abstract principles, and having them read Sir William Blackstone and other commentators on the law. These “abstract statements of teachers and text books,” Carter wrote, “even the best, make little impression upon the mind,” and a lawyer’s attention was not really concentrated “until he turns to the actual cases... and finds in them the living law as it has been actually developed by the real transactions of men.”

Legal Practice and Political Involvement. In 1853 Carter became managing clerk in the Kent and Davies office. The following year Carter formed his own firm, Scudder and Carter, and by the end of the Civil War Carter was one of the city’s leading lawyers. In the 1870s he was one of the prosecuting attorneys in the case against the Tweed Ring and helped recover for the city more than $6 million pilfered by corrupt politicians. Following this, Carter was named by Gov. Samuel Tilden to a commission to investigate municipal governments. Carter’s two suggestions, that city elections be closely monitored and that all municipal funds be handled by a Board of Finance chosen only by voters who met certain property qualifications, were little heeded at the time. Twenty years later, though, when Carter was president of the National Municipal League, he reasserted his proposals, warning that municipal corruption “is the subject of purchase by the great monied interests, and of corrupt bargains with party interests.”

The Field Code. Carter was one of the founders of New York City’s Bar Association, and served as its president five times. He led that organization in a campaign against enacting the proposed civil code of David Dudley Field. An eminent New York lawyer, Field had proposed a code of civil procedure in 1847, and New York had adopted it the following year. The code simplified legal practice and explained common law principles on personal rights, property, and legal obligations. In 1849 Missouri adopted the Field Code, and California, where David Field’s brother Stephen (later a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) was a prominent lawyer and state legislator, adopted the code in 1851. Field produced a revised civil code in 1865 and over the next twenty years worked to have New York, and other states, adopt it.

Opposition to the Code. Carter saw the move to adopt Field’s civil code in the 1880s as an attempt by “a few men,” or more properly one man, to “discard the principles and methods” of the law “and to substitute in its place a scheme of codification borrowed from the systems of despotic nations.” More to the point, Carter worried that the Field Code would turn over to the legislature the power to govern relations between people, rather than leaving this kind of “private law” under the jurisdiction of judges. Field was influenced by Jeremy Bentham and other legal reformers, who wanted to rationalize a chaotic world. Carter’s philosophy saw the law as more than a list of rules; the law was a system of justice derived from the unwritten folk wisdom of the people. A legal code was a statute frozen in a particular time, while the common law could be changed and adapted through practice. By 1883 there were six thousand cases in New York State involving disputes about the meaning of various provisions in Field’s 1848 Code. While the code promised to make the law simpler and more rational, Carter maintained that it was beyond the scope of human reason to make a firm set of rules that would cover all cases and situations. In 1889 Carter wrote The Provinces of the Written and the Unwritten Law, which influenced the New York State legislature to reject the Field Civil Code of 1865.

Other Activities. Carter argued many cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and became an expert in constitutional and maritime law. He also represented the United States at an international court of arbitration in March 1893 to resolve a dispute with England over seal fishing in the Bering Sea. In the income-tax case of 1895, Carter rejected the notion of the tax as a dangerous, communistic attempt to overthrow the established order. He warned the court: “Nothing could be more unwise and dangerous — nothing more foreign to the spirit of the Constitution — than an attempt to baffle and defeat a popular determination by a judgment in a lawsuit. When the opposing forces of sixty millions of people have become arrayed in hostile political ranks upon a question which all men feel is not a question of law, but of legislation, the only path of safety is to accept the voice of the majority as final.” Carter was condemned by his client, the Continental Trust Company, as a class traitor for accepting the wisdom of the masses. This was in keeping with his belief in common law, and of the necessity to change. However, as his Harvard class reunion address suggests, Carter did not accept change blindly or with unlimited approval.