Our friends over at legal history blog have already mentioned that Traveling the Beaten Trail: Charles Tait's Changes to the Federal Grand Juries, 18225-1825 has appeared as volume 8 in the University of Alabama's Bounds Law Library Occasional Publications Series. My copy arrived last week and I want to talk a little more about it. My co-editor Sally Hadden and my former Alabama colleagues Paul Pruitt and David Durham present three of Judge Tait's charges to early grand juries, along with a facsimile of one of Tait's charges from his family papers in Montgomery (the other two appeared in the Mobile Register) and a catalog of his law books. They also have two essays -- one by Pruitt and Durham that tells Tait's biography and one by Hadden that places the grand jury charges into their context. Grand jury charges is a topic Sally's been working on for a while, throughout the south.
I'm a huge fan of the study of oratory, particularly by the judges, in the nineteenth century -- and also a fan of study of grand jury charges. I've thought for a long time that grand jury charges give us a very good look into the minds of judges and the problems they think the state should address. They're also a great example of how the leaders of the society promulgated their ideas and tried to disseminate their values. That is, the grand jury charges were frequently about problems that judges identified in the community that needed attention. In the case of Judge Tait they were about such things as the need for well-functioning courts and post office, and the preservation of judicial records. In the case of a Federalist judge I studied, one of his favorite topics was the breakdown of the respect of authority.
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