Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 04.pdf/44

The Supreme Court of Georgia.

29

Richard Malcolm Johnson, the well-known Southern writer, says that in literary accom plishments Judge Starnes surpassed all his contemporaries at the Georgia Bar. Sharswood and Budd, in their notes to a case in " Leading Cases on Real Property," call him a learned Judge, and cite with ap proval one of his decisions on the statute de donis.

Charles J. McDonald. This Judge came upon the bench after long executive service as Governor of the State. It has been thought that the value of executive experi Ebenezer Starnes. ence to the Judge, especially in dealing Although not the with quasi - political equal of the first great questions, can be triumvirate, this Judge traced in the career brought to the dis of Chief-Justices charge of his high Marshall, Taney, and duties that patient at Chase. Though the tention which Maledecisions of McDonald branche has aptly are not polished, and called "a natural seldom go outside of prayer for light," and the special facts of that diligence which the case in their rea enabled him to "labor soning, yet he was terribly." He was a regarded as a good man to whose sagacity Judge, and a man of the people looked for RICHARD F. LYON. strong intellectual guidance in trying times; and in the grasp. period between the military rule in Georgia in 1865 and reconstruction, he was one Henry L. Benning of a commission appointed to formulate a code of laws for the government of the was a man of robust intellect, and notably freedmen. The work of the commission was fond of logic dialectics. The most striking never published; and the surviving members characteristic of his decisions was the logi cal form in which he cast them. Syllogism are not over-solicitous to own their connec tion with it. The matter is interesting and dilemma were his favorite moulds of chiefly on account of the evidence that it thought. His mental attitude in the exam furnishes that even the wisest men in that ination of a case has already been indicated day were " slow of heart to believe " how by the sentiment quoted in contrast with that radical a change the results of the war had of Judge Lumpkin. Judge Benning won great celebrity in the wrought in the status of the negro race. In one decision he doubtless exceeded judi cial propriety by remarking in a dissenting opinion that he did not purpose to " embalm himself in judicial infamy" by concurring in the decision of the majority. He lived to see the whole scheme of relief pass away in the recovered prosperity of the State, and to find himself sustained by the Supreme Court of the United States (Gunn v. Barry, 15 Wall. 610) in holdingthat the homestead exemption was not pro tected from the lien of a judgment obtained prior to the passage of the homestead law.