James Fitzjames Stephen

James Fitzjames Stephen

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1st Baronet , (born March 3, 1829 in Kensington (London) , † March 11, 1894 in Ipswich , Suffolk ) was an English lawyer, legal historian, philosopher and essayist.

Life

His father was Sir James Stephen , temporarily Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. He was the brother of Herbert Stephen and Leslie Stephen , father of Virginia Woolf (and biographer of James Fitzjames Stephen). Stephen's father (and grandfather) played an important role in English anti-slave legislation. Stephen attended Eton College and King's College in London and studied from 1847 at the Trinity College of Cambridge University . He was introduced to the Cambridge Apostles by law professor Henry Maine , who remained lifelong friends . He turned to a legal career and was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1854 and was later (1875-1879) Professor of Common Law at the Inns of Court . He was an attorney on the Midland Circuit until 1869 (with moderate success). From 1858 to 1861 he was secretary of the Royal Commission on Popular Education and in 1869 he became a legal member of the Colonial Council of India as successor to Maine and edited bills for India such as the Indian Evidence Act (1872), which was entirely his own work, and the Indian Contracts Act (1872). During this time he was in India. In 1872 he was back in England and was working as a lawyer again. In 1873 he ran for a seat in Parliament in Dundee, but lost. In 1879 he became a High Court judge (judge in the Queen's Bench). In the same year he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Stephen had his first stroke in 1885. He resigned in 1891 due to a decline in mental abilities. On the occasion of his resignation from the judicial office on June 29, 1891, he was awarded the hereditary title of baronet , of de Vere Gardens, in the Parish of Saint Mary Abbot, Kensington, in the County of London.

He married Mary Richenda Cunningham in 1855 and had nine children with her, including three sons and four daughters, who survived him. When he died in 1894, his eldest son Herbert Stephen (1857–1932) inherited his title of nobility.

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Early in his career he also earned extra income as a journalist and literary critic, writing for The Saturday Review from its founding in 1855. They were later edited as collections of essays. After founding the Pall Mall Gazette (1865), he wrote for it until he became a judge. He has also published in Fraser's Magazine and Cornhill Magazine. In his essays he wrote about Thomas Hobbes , David Hume , Edward Gibbon , Edmund Burke , Jeremy Bentham and Alexis de Tocqueville , among others , the main influences on him were Hobbes and Bentham.

In 1863 he published his book General view of criminal law of England , the aim of which was to explain the principles of English criminal justice in a generally understandable manner. This reflected his later efforts for simplification and transparency in adapting the English criminal justice system for India. After his return, he tried reforms in England, but mostly failed despite several attempts in parliament (one of his drafts was used in 1892 for a codification of Canadian criminal law). His historical materials on English law, which he collected for this purpose, he published in 1883 as the History of the criminal law of England . The work occupies a prominent place in English legal historiography.

In 1873 he published Liberty, Equality, Fraternity in response to and criticism of neo- utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill . It first appeared anonymously in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1872/73. Stephen was influenced by the utilitarianism of a Bentham, but emphasized the need for firm, force-enforced rules (similar to Hobbes' doctrine of the state (Leviathan), which Stephen considered the greatest English philosopher) and the moral self-responsibility of the individual. The title of his book played on the French Revolution's motto of freedom, equality, brotherhood . However, he sees advantages and disadvantages in each of the terms and both should be considered when it comes to the maximum good of society. According to him, freedom is not a value in itself, as it is negatively defined as freedom from restriction or compulsion. However, certain constraints are necessary (given by morality, law and religion) and freedom should therefore be understood as freedom from injurious restraint. To maintain it, power must be transferred to institutions that enforce the restrictions necessary to maintain freedom. He was a proponent of the death penalty, which he believed to have a deterrent effect.

Caricature of James Fitzjames Stephen in 1885 as a judge, Vanity Fair

Legal cases

In 1889 he was a judge on the murder charges against Florence Maybrick (1862–1941). She came from a southern American banking family and married a wealthy cotton merchant from Liverpool. Her husband died in 1889, arsenic was found in the body (although not a lethal dose), but the cause was unclear. The Maybrick family suspected her of poisoning her husband, and Stephen sentenced her to death in the subsequent trial. The case attracted a lot of attention at the time and the sentencing to death outraged. She was pardoned to life imprisonment and released in 1904. Stephen was also a judge in the trial of Israel Lipski , who was sentenced to death for murder and executed in 1887.

Other cases in his early career included the defense of clergyman Rowland Williams (1817-1870) against allegations of heresy (1861). Williams was a respected theologian (professor of Hebrew at St. David's College in Lampeter) and had criticized the rejection of the historical biblical criticism coming from Germany by representatives of the Anglican Church (by comparing it with derelict senators from Tiberius). Williams was first defeated by the Court of Arches, but was exonerated by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Stephen also made an unsuccessful attempt to bring the Governor of Jamaica Edward Eyre to justice for the bloody suppression of a revolt ( Morant Bay Uprising, 1865).

In 1885 he published a defense for the Chief Justice of Bengal Elijah Impey (1732-1809) against the accusation of the historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay that he had committed judicial murder during his time under the Governor of Bengal Warren Hastings . It was the case of Maharaja Nandakumar (also called Nuncomar, around 1705-1775), who was a tax collector in Bengal and a political opponent of Warren Hastings. When Hastings was again governor in 1773, Nuncomar charged him with unlawful enrichment, which was supported by Sir Philip Francis (1740-1818), among others . Hastings, who had overridden his own conviction by the Supreme Council of Bengal, brought Nuncomar to court for fraud and his friend, Judge Impey, pronounced the death sentence, whereupon Nuncomar was hanged in 1775. Thereupon Hastings and Impey were removed from office by the English parliament, among other things at the instigation of Francis. Edmund Burke and later Macaulay charged Impey with judicial murder. Stephen, on the other hand, found in his investigation into the case that Nuncomar had received a fair trial.

Fonts

• Essays by a Barrister, London: Elder, 1862 (Essays, Anonymous)
• A General View of the Criminal Law of England. London: Macmillan 1863, 2nd edition 1890
• The Indian evidence act (I. of 1872): With an Introduction on the Principles of Judicial Evidence. London: Macmillan., 1872.
• Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. London: Smith, Elder, 1873, 2nd edition 1874.
• with Herbert Stephen: A digest of criminal law, Macmillan 1877
• A History of the Criminal Law of England, 3 volumes, London: Macmillan & Co., 1883.
• A Digest of the Law of Criminal Procedure in Indictable Offences, Macmillan 1883
• The Story of Nuncomar and the Impeachment of Sir Elijah Impey, 2 volumes, Macmillan 1885
• Horae sabbaticae, 3 volumes, Macmillan 1892 (essays)

His collected works appear in 11 volumes with Oxford University Press edited by the Editorial Institute at Boston University.

literature

• KJM Smith: Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004 (Online)
• KJM Smith: Stephen: Portrait of a Victorian Rationalist, Cambridge University Press 1988
• James A. Colaiaco: James Fitzjames Stephen and the Crisis of Victorian Thought. London: Macmillan 1983
• Leslie Stephen: The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., A Judge of the High Court of Justice, London: Smith, Elder 1895, Archives
• James C. Livingston: The Religious Creed and Criticism of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Victorian Studies, Volume 17, 1974, pp. 279-300.
• Stephen J. Morse: Thoroughly Modern: Sir James Fitzjames Stephen on Criminal Responsibility, Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Volume 5, 2008, pp. 505-522.
• Richard Posner : The Romance of Force: James Fitzjames Stephen on Criminal Law, Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law, Volume 10, 2012, pp. 263-275.
• John Hotstettler: Politics and law in the life of James Fitzjames Stephen, Chichester: Barry Rose Law Publishers 1995

Web links

• James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (LF ed.), 1874 , Online Library of Liberty (Ed. Stuart D. Warner)
• John Heydon, Reflections on James Fitzjames Stephen, University of Queensland Law Journal, Volume 29, 2010, p. 43 , PDF

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The London Gazette : No. 26177, pp. 3451 f. , June 30, 1891.
2. ^ Stephen, Selected Edition