James Coolidge Carter

James Coolidge Carter was an American lawyer and legal theorist who lived from 14 October 1827 to 14 February 1905, born in Lancaster, Massachusetts and educated at Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He built a prominent New York City practice and in 1854 helped found the firm that became Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, while emerging as the leading American opponent of the movement to replace judge-made common law with comprehensive statutory codes, a position that put him in direct and lasting opposition to the codifier David Dudley Field. He served on a New York City commission on municipal administration in 1875 under Governor Samuel Tilden and on the state's constitutional commission of 1888 under Governor David Hill, and President Benjamin Harrison appointed him counsel for the United States before the Bering Sea arbitration tribunal in 1892. He helped found and served as first president of the National Civic League, was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1895 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1896, and his defense of the common-law method appears in his books The Provinces of the Written and the Unwritten Law of 1889 and the posthumously published Law, Its Origin, Growth and Function of 1907.