James Bradley Thayer

Jurist, born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, USA. Educated at Harvard, he was admitted to the Boston bar in 1856 and conducted a private practice while contributing to legal volumes. He then became a professor of law at Harvard (1874–1902) and was one of those who introduced the case system to the law school. He wrote Cases on Constitutional Law (1895), A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence (1898), and many other works. Off the bench he urged tariff reform and allotment of lands to Native Americans. He published a variety of non-legal works, including reviews of translations from Latin and Greek and a biography of John Marshall.

James Bradley Thayer (1831-1902), American legal writer and educationist, was born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, on the isth of January 1831. He graduated at Harvard College in 1852, and at the Harvard Law School in 1856, in which year he was admitted to the bar of Suffolk county and began to practice in Boston. In 1873-83 he was Royall professor of law at Harvard; in 1883 he was transferred to the professorship which after 1893 was known as the Weld professorship and which he held until his death on the i4th of February 1902.

He wrote: The Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law (1893); A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law (1898), and a short life of John Marshall (1901);