Progress, Stability and the Struggle for Equality
A Ramble Through The Early Years of
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
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
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
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
Nor is the book without its biting sarcasm. MacMahon describes a series of cases involving people injured at work and the
We seem here to have reached a point in our ramble through the early years of
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.
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