Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/236

elected a Circuit Court Commissioner, but being restless and dissatisfied removed to Ohio in 1852, taking up his residence in Toledo, where he formed a partnership in the real-estate business. He remained at Toledo until the real-estate boom, which that city was enjoying at that time, collapsed, and then returned again to Michigan, determined to win success, if possible, in the law. He again made his home in Adrian, and was at one time junior member of the firm of Beaman, Beecher, & Cooley. The senior member of this firm, Fernando C. Beaman, was a member of Congress from 1861 to 1863; and in 1879 was appointed by the Governor to fill the unexpired term of Zachariah Chandler in the Senate of the United States, but declined the appointment. Mr. Cooley also became the senior member of the firm of Cooley & Croswell, the junior member being after wards twice elected Governor of Michigan.

In 1857 Mr. Cooley was appointed to compile the General Statutes of the State, and in 1858 he was made the Official Reporter of the Supreme Court of Michigan. In 1859, as before indicated, he was appointed a professor in the University Law School, when he removed his residence to Ann Arbor, where he has since continued to reside. He was then thirty-five years of age, and entered on his duties with zeal and energy. In 1864 he became a Judge of the Supreme Court of the State. His associates on the bench, who already knew something of his high qualifications for the

WILLIAM P. WELLS.

place, welcomed him to the position as a worthy successor of the lamented Manning, who had been removed from the bench by death; and yet, as one of them has since said, they were and continued to be more and more surprised and gratified by the abilities which he continued more and more to exhibit as a Judge the longer he continued on the bench. Judge Cooley retired from the Law Faculty in 1884, and from the Supreme Court in 1885. Since his retirement from the Faculty he has not withdrawn his interest in the school, and has from time to time delivered lectures therein, notably so on Taxation and Constitutional Law. Judge Cooley's career as a University professor, Judge of the Supreme Court, and writer of law treatises is a resplendent one. His works have made him famous in Europe as well as in America, and his name has been a tower of strength to the University of Michigan, which made him a Doctor of Laws in 1873, a similar honor being conferred on him by Harvard University in 1886. As "the one great law book of the last century," the Commentaries of Blackstone, was the fruit of a professorship in law in an English University, so most of the classic legal literature of this country has been the fruitage of similar professorships here. Chancellor Kent's Commentaries were the results of his law professorship in Columbia College. All of Story's works—some thirteen volumes—are the fruits of his work as Dane Professor