Progress, Stability and the Struggle for Equality
A Ramble Through The Early Years of Maine Law 1820-1920
By Hugh G. E. MacMahon
Drummond Woodsum & MacMahon
$28.00, soft cover, 346 pages, 978-0-2019015-4-7 (2009)
Hugh MacMahon, a former partner (now “of counsel”) with the law firm of Drummond Woodsum, has written an engaging account of the first 100 years of Maine law. As he notes in the preface, this semi-retirement from full time practice gave him more free time than he was accustomed to and he found himself “thinking about the historical development of Maine law.” So what did he do? One day, he decided to read the first hundred years of Maine law. Though he admits that he didn’t read all of the decisions of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court from 1820 -1920, MacMahon did “at least skim almost all of them and made notes on what seemed to be the most important cases.”
For anyone who has had to do legal research that entails reviewing cases decided over 100 years ago, the task of reading even a majority of cases during this time period is mind boggling. (As a former law clerk for the Superior Court in Portland who spent a fair amount of time holed up in dusty stacks of the Cleaves Law Library, I am profoundly impressed with MacMahon’s monumental task.)
After reading all that nineteenth century law, MacMahon became convinced that he needed to write about it.
Maybe, I thought, if I just start writing, I might begin to see the outline of a project that could be of some interest to others besides myself. Maybe someone starting out in the practice of law in Maine would find something here that, by providing historical context, would make their practice more interesting than it otherwise would be. Maybe something here would encourage someone to delve more deeply into the history of a legal concept and gain a new and helpful insight as a result. Maybe someone would encounter an idea here by which to test that person’s own thoughts about the soundness of a rule of law. I’m sure that I would have benefited if, when I began to practice law in Portland, I had made it a point to study the history of Maine law. In undertaking this project, I therefore feel a special obligation to lawyers who are today just entering the profession here in Maine.
The title of this volume, Progress, Stability, and the Struggle for Equality, refers to the three themes – the importance of economic progress, the importance of maintaining a safe and stable society, and the struggle for equal rights under the law – that, for me, stand out most prominently in looking back over the entire sweep of the first hundred years of the development of Maine law.
Lawyers, judges, law students and historians should rejoice in MacMahon’s decision to write this book about the early years of Maine law. Its rambling pace, with somewhat arbitrary chapters of various topics of Maine law, prevents the book from being overly formal and too much like a law school textbook. Instead, the impression given is that of a knowledgeable senior attorney regaling the reader with key insights not only into the history of Maine law, but how it relates to modern events.
Nor is the book without its biting sarcasm. MacMahon describes a series of cases involving people injured at work and the Law Court‘s uncompromising stand on behalf of employers. Claims by injured workers were routinely rejecting by finding that they were negligent themselves or their injuries were the result of negligence of their co-workers. It appears that MacMahon tires of describing the Court’s misguided view that economic progress should come before employee safety.
We seem here to have reached a point in our ramble through the early years of Maine law when we need to pause and take a rest. The cumulative impact of these cases that involved gruesome accidents is painful and difficult to bear. We long for fresher air. So here, as we take a moment to consider the sorry circumstance of these Maine children who, many years ago, were injured while at work, let us take a moment to reflect on “The Golf Links,” a simple verse penned by the American poet, Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn.
The Golf Links
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
Much of the book reads like a tragedy, with Maine judges routinely siding with economic progress over public safety, committing the poor to workhouses without a hearing, prohibiting business on Sundays, allowing corporal punishment in public schools (along with the reading of the bible), and granting married women in Maine few rights and no individual identity of their own. However, MacMahon manages to find the bright spots in our legal history where despite harsh results by the Court’s majority, dissenting voices sometimes write prophetic opinions that later become accepted law.
Regardless of whether you’ve been practicing law for five days or fifty years, Progress, Stability, and the Struggle for Equality will help you to understand our state’s legal past and appreciate our present.
Buy it here.
