James C Carter

Biography

Carter was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1827, the youngest child of a large and needy family. He entered Harvard College in 1846 and graduated in 1850. He rowed stroke oar in his class boat and was class orator at commencement. Joseph H. Choate said of him:

When I entered Harvard College in 1848 Mr. Carter, who had already been there for two years, was a very marked man among the 300 students who then constituted the entire community of the little college. To very commanding abilities he added untiring industry and to a lofty character most pleasing manners, a combination which easily made him foremost. He was filled with an honorable ambition, and took all the prizes; he took an interest in the public questions of the day and cultivated the art of speaking with discriminating assiduity; he was a devoted admirer of Mr. Webster . . ., and I always thought he modeled himself upon that noble example in style, in expression and in the mode of treating every question that arose. Indeed in his last years I regarded him as the last survivor of the Websterian school.

Carter later attended Harvard Law School until 1853. He had entered the law school in 1851 after spending a year tutoring in New York City. It was during this year in New York City that he worked in the office of Kent & Davies, where his attendance was only nominal.

One of the partners of Kent & Davies, Henry E. Davies, later came to see Carter at Harvard Law School. Davies told Carter that the firm of Kent & Davies was about to be dissolved, that the firm of Davies & Scudder would be located at 66 Wall Street, and that he wanted Carter to accept a position as managing clerk. Carter accepted the offer, and shortly thereafter was admitted to the New York bar. After about a year, Davies & Scudder dissolved when Davies left to become Corporation Counsel of The City of New York. So in 1854, at the age of 28, after one year of practice, Carter became a junior partner in Scudder & Carter, which has under its successive organization leading to CL&M, in the words of Joseph Choate, “occupied a great place in the annals of the profession in New York.”

Carter, instead of deriving any special benefit from it at the outset of his career, had to make his own way by dint of long hours and hard work. Starting with little money and no major clients, Carter by 1865 had become prominent as a litigator and was being sought out by other lawyers to assist them in their cases. Thus, he was asked by Charles O'Conor, a well-known New York lawyer, to assist him in number of cases, including an action against William Marcy Tweed, boss of Tammany Hall, to recover funds for the City of New York. David Dudley Field represented the defendant. The preparation and trial of the case by Carter and O’Conor resulted in a verdict in which the City recovered over $60,000,000.

As a result of his endeavors in the Tweed case, in 1877 Carter was appointed a member of Governor Tilden’s commission to devise a plan for the government of cities, to prevent a repetition of Tweed’s system. The plan which the Commission proposed was that the government of cities should be non-partisan; as a result, it was not adopted.

In 1870 Carter joined with other prominent New York lawyers in establishing The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and he was twice president of the Association, first 1884–1885 and a second time in 1897–1899.

As Robert W. Gordon of Stanford law School points out, during the years from 1870 to 1900 Carter was involved in many of the important movements for the reform of New York City government: he was a member of the Tilden Commission mentioned above, the anti-Tammany Committee of Seventy (formed by seventy members of The Association of the Bar to oppose Tammany boss Richard Croker), the National Municipal League (of which he was president in 1896), the Citizens Union (which he helped to found), the Good Government Clubs, and the City Club of New York (of which Carter had been its first president). He was elected an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1896. Carter was also a member of the Committee of One Hundred (actually 104 members) organized to support a reform plan for New York City schools.

Under Carter’s leadership, the Bar Association was also prominent in defeating David Dudley Field’s proposed civil code. The arguments Carter then framed and addressed to successive legislatures and governors led to the final rejection of the code. His views were published in a series of pamphlets, the first of which appeared in 1884 under the title The Proposed Codification of our Common Law. “The main theme of Carter’s argument,” according to George W. Martin, “was built on a distinction he drew between ‘written’ or statutory law, originated and occasionally repealed or revised by the legislature, and the ‘unwritten’ or common law, which was revealed by the decisions of judges.” With respect to the unwritten law, Carter maintained that the judge’s function was “to apply the existing standard of justice (Carter’s emphasis) to the new exhibition of fact, and to do this by ascertaining the conclusion to which right reason, aided by rules already established leads.” That standard of justice rested on public opinion, which he defined as follows:

And what is this but saying that law, in order to be obeyed and enforced, must accord with the public standard or conception of justice? All well conceived efforts to make, or to declare, law, are, therefore, efforts to apply this public, or, as we have styled it, national, standard of justice to human conduct. This national standard, more particularly stated, is the final result of the moral and intellectual life and culture of a nation, the product of all the influences, public and private, which tend to cultivate and develop men’s conceptions of what is just, expedient and useful, and which is unconsciously perceived and felt by every individual member of society by reason of the fact that he is such a member, and exposed to like influences with his fellows.

In 1885, he delivered an address before the Virginia State Bar Association, which was afterwards published under the title of The Provinces of the Written and Unwritten Law. In 1890, he addressed the American Bar Association on “The Ideal and the Actual in the Law,” which embodied further views on his theory of the origin of law. In his later years he formulated his theories in a series of lectures which he planned to deliver at the Harvard Law School, and which were published posthumously by his executor, Lewis Cass Ledyard, in a book entitled Law: Its Origin Growth and Function.

In 1892, he was appointed one of the counsel to present the claims of the United States before the Bering Sea tribunal.

He died in New York City on February 14, 1905.