Servants of the law : judicial politics on the California frontier, 1849-89 : an interpretative exploration of the Field-Terry controversy

Servants of the Law examines the lives of two famous California judges, David S. Terry and Stephen J. Field, who created a lasting influence on the politics and judicial history of California's Supreme Court during the court's formative years of 1855 to 1865. These jurists shared the state's highest bench from 1857 to 1859 and, as events would later show, they confronted one another combatively, on and off, for almost thirty-five years. California's beginnings as a United States territory and later as the nation's thirty-first state were, in large part, fashioned in the wake of the country's malevolent and unforgiving the Civil War. Together, Terry and Field's lives served as an animate metaphor for the cultural and constitutional diversity that many nineteenth-century northern and southern judicial immigrants held toward one another. Annotation. Servants of the Law examines the lives of two famous California judges, David S. Terry and Stephen J. Field, who created a lasting influence on the politics and judicial history of California's Supreme Court during the court's formative years of 1855 to 1865. These jurists shared the state's highest bench from 1857 to 1859 and, as events would later show, they confronted one another combatively, on and off, for almost thirty-five years. California's beginnings as a United States territory and later as the nation's thirty-first state were, in large part, fashioned in the wake of the country's malevolent and unforgiving the Civil War. Together, Terry and Field's lives served as an animate metaphor for the cultural and constitutional diversity that many nineteenth-century northern and southern judicial immigrants held toward one another "Among the judicial immigrants ... were the southerner David S. Terry of Texas and the northerner Stephen J. Field of New York. These men served on California's highest court during its formative, strenuous years from 1855 to 1863. ... The intellectual similarities and differences that these two shared ... played themselves out over a period of 35 years and brought about a series of events that neither man could have envisioned. Their exchanges began as wary judicial amity within the courtroom, but in short order spilled out into the community as public grudges. Neither judge could tolerate the other's regional provincialism; hence, lifelong resentments inevitably turned into a bitterness that led to tragedy"--Foreword, p. vii This book examines the lives of two famous California judges, David S. Terry and Stephen J. Field, who created a lasting influence on the politics and judicial history of California's Supreme Court during the court's formative years of 1855 to 1865.