,
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. needed to order " Samuel Rowland to give the said Samuel Baker a Hatt " for having assaulted him, rather than to discuss the effect of a lis pendens upon an oscillating and vagrant title. Of course, at the present day, to be plainly unseasoned in technical law is hardly the thing for a judge, even in Pennsylvania. But a certain sort of technical ignorance in men otherwise educated and able, had its good side one hundred and fifty years ago. Mr. Peter McCall points out, in an address delivered in 1838, that the educated com mon-sense of these early amateur jurists led them empirically to reach a system of plead ing and procedure which specifically antici pated by more than a hundred years many of the improvements made in England by the Westminster Rules, 3 and 4 William IV. Had this assertion been made by any but such a scholar as Mr. McCall, it would not deserve much attention. Statements of a kindred nature are often made in this coun try when American novelties are contrasted with English traditions; and they are usu ally the blossom of a fresh and complacent ignorance. But coming from such a source, they may be believed. Mention has been made of David Lloyd's effort to have the judge's commission dum bene se gesserint. Fifty years later, in 1759, this very great step in advance was taken, and the judges were rendered independent of shifting politics, and commissioned during good behavior. This was again limited dur ing the troubled times of 1776; but in 1789 the term was restored. After James Logan, Benjamin Chew is undoubtedly the most prominent figure. Much of the legal blood in Pennsylvania seems to have come originally "from Mary land, where Mr. Chew was born. This was in 1722, when his family had been in Amer ica for a hundred years. He learned his first law under Andrew Hamilton in Phila delphia. But like a good many of his con temporaries, what book learning the attorney could then get in America he felt was not 4
25
sufficiently thorough. Mr. Chew therefore went on with his studies at the Middle Temple. On his return to this country he left Philadelphia for a while and practised in New Castle, and did not reappear at this bar for several years. Almost immediately upon his doing so, the office of Attorney-General fell vacant, and he was chosen for the place. As he was a comparative stranger in the town and only thirty-three years old, this is a good evidence of the respect for his gifts that the community felt. He held the po sition for seventeen years; but it was by no means the only one given him. And al though he seems to have filled important offices in the Lower Counties as well as in Philadelphia, they were not neglected, in spite of the somewhat wide geography they involved. A little later he appears as a leader at the bar. The same vol ume of reports in which William Allen's decisions are found shows Benjamin Chew as counsel in many of the cases, — in fact, in all but one where counsel's name is given at all. The first case he is reported as pre siding in is Hurst v. Dippo, 1 Dall. 25, where a list of the first purchasers under William Penn was admitted in evidence to prove the plaintiffs title to certain land, the deeds being lost. This list, Chief-Justice Tilghman said later, has " often since been received without opposition." The Declaration of Independence stripped the Chief-Justice of all his positions. After the Revolution, with which he did not sympathize, so high a value was never theless put upon him that he was, in 1791, called from private life at his county-place, "Cliveden," to preside over the new High Court of Errors and Appeals during its existence, which ended in 1807, only three years before the Justice's death. This body, be it said in passing, was the tribunal of last resort in Pennsylvania; but such radical change worked by the Revolution lived only sixteen years, and then left the jurisdictions of the various courts much as they had been since the days of David Lloyd.
